Re: more on #92263, dpkg --list truncates package names
| > This bug report, is wrongly labeled as "wishlist". It should be
| > "important", because it makes dpkg useless:
| >=20
| It does not make dpkg "useless", dpkg can still install, upgrade and
| remove packages.
It surely makes --list <pattern> useless. How do you remove a package
when you can't use --list to find out its name? I would say it is clear
that this is an important (and easy) bug to fix.
| > More generally, unix programs should never truncate their output to fit
| > a terminal. Terminals are irrelevent; pipes are everything.
| >=20
| Convention disagrees with you. Programs nearly always truncate their
| output to terminal width, but are usually a little brighter and don't
| truncate where there's a pipe.
I wouldn't say "nearly always", and in fact I can't think of any others,
but I admit that there is some software out there that fails to follow
proper unix conventions. Please, please, please don't make one of
debian's core utilities share that defect!
At least give it the option to do the right thing!
Unix is about software tools: programs that do one job well, and that
cooperate with other programs. You can always pipe the output of dpkg
to "less -S" or "gui-frontend" if you want to, but you can't recover
information that was thrown away by bug #92263.
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