[Aptitude-devel] Bug#539978: marked as done ("show" says an installed package is not installed)

[Daniel Hartwig]

Control: reopen -1
Control: tags -1 = confirmed
Control: severity -1 minor
Control: owner -1 !
Control: retitle -1 [cmdline] "show UPGRADE" misleads by reporting "not installed"

[To clarify this report.  Also, taking ownership as it is entangled with
 wip-cmdline.]

"Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo" <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com> wrote:
> # aptitude versions '^apt$'
> Package apt:
> i   0.9.14.2                    100
> p   0.9.15            unstable  500
>
> # aptitude show apt
> Package: apt
> Essential: yes
> State: installed
> Automatically installed: no
> Version: 0.9.14.2

The package details shown above are for the installed version.  The
manual states that "show" displays the candidate version, which is
presently not the case due to open issues with version selection on the
command line [1].

Details for the candidate version still show "not installed":

 $ aptitude show acpi | grep '^\(Pac\|Ver\|Sta\)'
 Package: acpi
 State: installed
 Version: 1.6-1
 $ aptitude show acpi=CANDIDATE | grep '^\(Pac\|Ver\|Sta\)'
 Package: acpi
 State: not installed
 Version: 1.7-1

The concern being that it is misleading to report "not installed" for
upgrades, though it may be technically correct, in a sense.  It has been
suggested to make things more clear by changing the state field to say
"not installed, upgrade" or similar.

An alternative is for "aptitude show PKG" to display both the candidate
and installed versions, as apt-cache does.


The wip-cmdline branch resolves the version selection issues and will
make this issue with State more prominent again.  The issue will be
tended to in a continuation of that work.


Regards

Daniel Hartwig


[1] http://bugs.debian.org/687474