[Aptitude-devel] Bug#802532: aptitude: Missing comparison operators in "Unable to satisfy the build-depends" error message

[Axel Beckert]

Control: clone -1 -2
Control: retitle -2 aptitude: Remove trailing dots from "Unable to satisfy the build-depends" (and maybe other) error messages
Control: severity -2 minor
Control: tag -2 - pending

Hi Manuel,

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote in the first reply:
[Missing comparison operators]
> Either this was caused e.g. by recent-ish changes in apt, or the bug has
> been present since ~2008 (code not modified since then), so I marked it
> that at least it is found in the version of Jessie (confirmed it).
[...]
> Fixed in VCS, it was using the wrong variable (and the bug was uncovered
> for 7+ years, congrats!).

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote in the second reply:
[Not resolving some more complex build-dependencies]
> It was due to a typo causing a malfunction, also dating back to the date
> when the feature was added (2008).
[...]
> But in any case, it is strange that this survived lurking for so many
> years (7+) since the feature was added, without more bug reports
> alerting about the problem.

I guess this is indeed because most people probably use apt-get for
build-dependencies because it had that feature for a much longer time.

Nevertheless, I'm a little bit proud that I seem to have found two not
yet reported, 7+ years old bugs in one bug-report. :-)

But what I'm way more happy about is how quickly they got fixed. :-)
Thanks!

Again citing from the first reply:
> >Also the trailing dot at the end of all these error messages looks wrong
> >-- but is probably not a technical issue, just a question of grammar.
> 
> I also find strange to have the trailing dot and I think that it would
> better be removed, but all similar messages have this (I avoided to
> remove it in another instance for the same reason, consistency), so I
> think that if this is to be removed it's better if it's done in all
> cases, and perhaps as part of a more general revamp of the command line
> messages.

I agree that this should not be fixed in the same commit as the other
two issues.

I vaguely remember a discussion on one of the i18n mailing lists which
made me aware of the fact that error messages in the English language
commonly do not end in a dot while in the German language they usually
do. So I think we indeed should change this at some time in the
future -- probably for all occurences in one commit. Cloning the bug
report accordingly for this.

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