[Aptitude-devel] Bug#710687: aptitude: highlight the "alternative dependencies bar |"

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 2 June 2013 09:10, Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo at scientia.net> wrote:
> Hi Daniel.
>
> On Sun, 2013-06-02 at 01:03 +0000, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote:
>> Unnecessary noise.  Visual cues such as alternate colour are quite
>> attention grabbing and must be reserved for very important details
>> such as e.g. broken packages and changing state.  The alternatives are
>> displayed in the common control file format, using an alternate colour
>> on the syntax characters is quite distracting.
> Well one could have done something like this with an option that
> defaults to off.

Implementing and supporting optional features adds work.  I have no
interest doing this for features which are only of subjective value.
You will see this attitude reflected in the next major development
branch where many existing options will be deprecated.

>
> So everybody not liking it, could have left it as is.
>
> Apart from that, just colourising the bar | itself (I wasn't talking
> about the whole line of course), doesn't seem that intention grabbing,
> does it?

That is what I understood you to mean, just the bar.  However, I
consider this would be more distracting.  And yes, it is rather a
matter of taste.

> Anyway, I think we do have a general problem in Debian, that one cannot
> really follow what one wants with respect to alternatives... as well as
> when such are added or dropped.
>
> […]

Personally I dont have trouble with that.  Although it does place some
burden on the administrator, the information is well structured and
certainly not hidden.

I leave your other reports about that open, maybe someone has
suggestions e.g. for an algorithm to detect such changes.

>
>
> Just yesterday I saw a case, where a package recommends some
> libsocket-perl | libsocket6-perl
> package or something like that.
> However, libsocket6-perl was already installed earlier as a "strict"
> dependency... so I never noticed that the other package recommended
> libsocket-perl.
>
> As a follow up, there was really functionality missing.
>

In aptitude you can pres ‘[’ on the line which says e.g. Recommends,
and expands the whole tree under it.  Items in that tree correspond to
the alternatives in each recommendation, and are colourized based on
package state.  I find such a view quite useful and always use it when
changes packages I am very interested in.

I see your related requests are really to collapse the colourizing in
those subtrees to the "Recommends" line itself.  Personally I would
find that distracting, and the information is already presented that
way in the subtree.  Anyway, leaving them open people can comment.

Regards