[Aptitude-devel] Bug#626829: "Current status" looks like an error warning

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2015-09-10 13:28 GMT+01:00 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson <jidanni at jidanni.org>:
> All I know is
>
> "No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
> 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
> Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used."
>
> is totally understandable by me,

Now that you mention it, maybe a matter of taste, but for me those
three lines are quite redundant and should be reduced to two lines or
one, and I am moderately unhappy that aptitude spits those 3 lines all
the time.

(I am pretty sure that there are reports about that as well).


> So all that needs to be done is have that mystery line of gobbledygook
> become a fourth line of English.
>
> Just have it say whatever it is trying to say in English, instead of
> Martian language.
>
> I mean is it all that bad to have four lines of English instead of three
> lines of English and one line of Martian language?

In the example above, I prefer the 2nd over the 1st even if the first
is more "prose-like" English.  In fact, I think that the first line is
useless, having the second around, and that the 2nd is easier to
understand at a glance.  Even without calling it Martian, I suppose
that one can say that this is not very prose-like either:

  Current status: 287 (+4) updates, 4629 (-3) new.

But I very much prefer it over the more prose-like:

  Current status: there are 287 updates available (4 added from last
run), 4629 newly available packages (3 less compared to last run), 3
broken packages left (3 new from last run).


Anyway, I explained my reasons to want to not to make bigger changes
to this at this time.  Other developers didn't want to make changes
either, and stated this in the reports and pointed out to further
explanations about the reasons to not change this.  The current
message is more clear than "There are 0 new [-1]" and now it should be
hard to confuse with errors, which were the original complaints.  And
there is a way to hide the message with "-q", if one prefers not to
see it.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>