[Aptitude-devel] Bug#991578: Bug#991578: aptitude: document state indicator letters more clearly

Axel Beckert abe at debian.org
Wed Jul 28 09:06:45 BST 2021


Control: tag -1 + confirmed

Hi Greg,

Greg Wooledge wrote:
> This patch improves the documentation of the state indicator letters, used
> in the output of the "search" and "why" actions.

Thanks a lot, this indeed looks like an improvement!

>From my mind there are also some more possible states, which seem not
to be documented in the manual at all on a first glance. IIRC these
are:

H or h = on hold
U or u = unpacked, but not configured, e.g. if the configure step in
         the previous run failed.
B      = broken (dependencies are not fullfilled)
F      = forbidden version

Except for "B" I'm not sure if they're lower or upper case, but that
should be easy to check.

IIRC those letters follow the letters in the first three columns of
the "dpkg -l" output where usually bad. (Except for "A" and "F" which
dpkg doesn't know about.)

And then I vaguely remember that dpkg also knows the state
"half-installed" which is worse than "unconfigured" and usually
requires to purge the package first before reinstalling it. But I
forgot the letter for it. Maybe the capital H.

		Regards, Axel
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