[Aptitude-devel] Bug#462063: Bug#462063: aptitude: please add a "See homepage" action for packages

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
> > > So I don't really think that it's a good idea to implement this, because
> > > it's like opening a can of worms; and even if it was it means a
> > > considerable amount of work, and I think that at the moment the scarce
> > > time would be better spent in other more pressing problems.
> >
> > I think both those features (opening home page in a browser as well as
> > reporting a bug on a package), both should be accessible if aptitude
> > does not run as root, if at all.
> >
> > I'm not sure how many aptitude users use the Aptitude TUI as non-root
> > at all. While it is probably a good idea security-wise, I use aptitude
> > as user basically only with querying options (search, show, version,
> > etc.) on the commandline.
> 
> From previous communications I thought that you were in favour of
> removing the reportbug and not implement this one;

Likely possible.

> but your wording makes me think that you are in favour of keeping
> them for non-root usage -- or is it "I prefer to remove report bug
> and not implement the browser launching, but if not going to be
> removed at least do it when aptitude is not invoked as root"?

It's a bit of both. The idea of disabling some features if running as
root just came to me when reading this thread and I think that's
better than completely removing them as some users seem to use them.
(IIRC there was some opposition of removing them.)

My initial thought was that some of the features (like the "open
homepage in browser" feature) makes more sense if an aptitude GUI is
running. We currently support them anymore, but I assume that they
were used more often as non-root than the TUI, so it seems to make
more sense there. That's how I came to the idea of making the
difference with running as root or not.

Running dpkg-reconfigure of course only makes sense if run as root
while browser and reportbug should not be run as root. So I consider
those different cases. The only similarity is that it would need
another keybinding.

Another thing which always come to my mind when it comes to the
aptitude TUI and reportbug is #412830 (Ctrl-Z + fg confuses aptitude:
down arrow runs reportbug) which is annoying and would be gone for no
additional effort if the reportbug feature would be removed. Then
again, running reportbug is not the issue, but misinterpreting escape
sequences after being foregrounded again. reportbug is just a symptom
there.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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