Re: apt replaces old with new: does `After unpacking 0 B will be used' correct?
Regid Ichira wrote:
> I am not a native English speaker.
But you speak it well enough to have submitted some good
bugreports...
> The following is quoted from an
> aptitude upgrade process:
>
> 2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 80 not upgraded.
> Need to get 0 B/202 kB of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
Yes, the output seems to depend on whether the change in diskspace is
negative ("42 kB will be freed") or non-negative ("...will be used").
Grouping zero with the positive numbers is fairly conventional. But I
agree that it would be clearer if the non-negative case said "42 kB of
additional space will be used". Apt-get produces a message similar to
this, but it has the disadvantage of being too long to fit on one
line. (I assume the reason the shorter word "extra" is avoided is
because it also refers to a package priority.)
One solution that occurs to me is that increases could be expressed as
"42 kB will be needed", but I'm not sure whether that's really an
improvement.
> I guess it wanted to show that the size of the new packages, and the old ones,
> are the same. And no more disk space will be freed or required. Is there a
> place to submit a bug report, asking to replace
(This sounds like a job for "reportbug aptitude".)
> After unpacking 0 B will be used.
>
> with
>
> After unpacking 0 B more will be used, or freed.
>
> ?
>
If the idea is that it would say this whatever the disk-usage effects,
then it's definitely a bad idea. If the idea is that there should be
*three* messages, one of which is used *only* when it's "0 B", my own
preference would be a different approach - something like this:
Negative: "After unpacking 42 kB will be freed."
Zero: ""
Positive: "After unpacking 42 kB will be needed."
Unfortunately, wishlist bugs about aptitude's commandline are unlikely
to get fixed, since aptitude already has too many open bugs... The
Squeeze release notes even have a note advising users not to use
aptitude's commandline - if you aren't using its "full-screen" mode
(or fancy features like "aptitude search ~c") you're usually better
off with apt-get.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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