On Mon, 2004-12-27 at 20:18 -0500, Scott Schwartz wrote: > | > 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. > It's not an "important" bug in the severity sense, it would be nice to be fixed though but dpkg is in freeze right now. > | > 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! > Which side are you arguing on here? it's hard to tell. Unix convention is that programs may behave differently if they're run on a terminal than on a pipe. $ ls foo bar $ ls | cat foo bar $ ps 23157 PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 23157 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-data-server-1.0 --oaf-ac $ ps 23157 | cat PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 23157 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-data-server-1.0 --oaf-activate-iid=OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_DataServer_InterfaceCheck --oaf-ior-fd=48 It seems reasonable to me for "dpkg -l" to behave in the same manner, as it's primarily a user information tool. However I also think it's probably reasonable for the format to be changed from fixed-width to expanding the name and version columns and sacrificing the description space to fit the full package name and version in. You'd get the full-width description if you piped it. This is a more complicated change, and not suitable for pre-release. Scott -- Have you ever, ever felt like this? Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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