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

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 1 February 2014 13:58, Daniel Hartwig <mandyke at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

The same concern is valid for multi-arch alternates, especially in the
case of M-A: foreign packages that have an installed equivalent.

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

Another alternate is to handle this similar to how the curses
interface does, including a list of versions at the end.  Such an
approach has to be clear about informing the user which version is
providing the details, as dependencies, etc. are prone to change.


Regards