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

[Greg Wooledge]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 10:06:45AM +0200, Axel Beckert wrote:
> 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

For whatever reason, the aptitude developers did not include all of
the state letters in the man page.  They only included the "most
common" ones, even though the example right above that section includes
a letter that isn't in their list ("h").

This patch only moves things around within the man page.  I didn't add
any additional content, because I was going for a minimalist change.

A larger set of state letters is documented at
<https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02.en.html> (more
specifically, <https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02s02s02.en.html>)
which I *think* is what the man page is referring to when it talks about an
"aptitude reference manual" or "reference guide".

I don't know whether that's a complete set either.

The developers chose to keep that information out of the man page,
and I didn't want to step on any toes, so I kept it out of my patch
as well.  If the developers would like the full set of state letters to
be documented in the man page, I would definitely welcome that.