Steve Langasek wrote:
tags 352267 -moreinfo unreproducible thanks
Yes, it says REMOVED, not PURGED. It did not remove them, it purged them. It did not inform the user what it was going to do.A user who actually reads the man page and knows the difference between remove and purge would be rather upset after he agrees to the removal (in the expectation that the packages can be easily restored), and finds that they are actually purged.Um, no, a user who actually reads the manpage should have read *this*:
>... Then the program's print statement is inconsistent with the documentation, no? The program says it will REMOVE. Right? REMOVE != PURGE in this context. It's an important distinction. At a minimum, someone (like you, perhaps) ought to change the print statement so it agrees with the documentation and says PURGED. Is that too much to hope for? It's a pretty clear open-and-shut case of the program misleading the user, causing damage to other packages, that can be solved by a change to a print statement. If that's not a bug, what is? And I don't want to catch you saying either (a) It's a user error, so it's not a bug, or (b) It agrees with the documentation, so it's not a bug. Both of those statements are symptoms of early Alzheimer's disease, and I'd hate for a promising young guy like you to go that way. (a) is dumb because all users make errors, so software has to be designed to handle user errors with relatively little damage. (b) is dumb because there is far too much documentation on a Linux system to actually read all of it. Try a wc $(find /usr/share/doc -print) some time. You'll get impressively big numbers.