Re: Bug#129129: apt: --reinstall and --print-uris don't work together

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 01:19:09AM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:

> 
> On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> 
> > Which produced the following odd behaviour:
> > 
> > mizar# apt-get --reinstall --print-uris install debhelper
> > Reading Package Lists... Done
> > Building Dependency Tree... Done
> > 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 2
> > not upgraded.
> > Need to get 0B/184kB of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
> > Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
> > mizar# 
> 
> But there is nothing odd about that, it always prompts y/n for a
> reinstall and you already had the package downloaded so --print-uris does
> nothing. --print-uris is ment to be used with sneaker-net, not for
> querying uris of arbtitary things.

In that case, I suggest clarifying the documentation:

       --print-uris
              Instead of fetching the files to install their URIs
              are printed. Each URI will have the path, the  des­
              tination  file  name, the size and the expected md5
              hash. Note that the file name to write to will  not
              always match the file name on the remote site! This
              also works with the /source/ command. Configuration
              Item: APT::Get::Print-URIs.

This should probably mention somewhere that URIs will only be printed for
files which are not in the cache.  I would reword the first sentence as:

"Instead of fetching the files to install, print the URI of each file that
would have been fetched".

This small change will emphasize what will actually happen, and prevent
folks like me from being surprised.

-- 
 - mdz