[Piuparts-devel] Bug#458921: piuparts: should provide a summary of the test

[Christoph Biedl]

Lucas Nussbaum wrote...

> Piuparts logs are difficult to parse and understand.
> It would be great if piuparts could, at the end of the run,
> display a summary of what happened, with the successful tests and the
> failed ones.

I was about to file a bug report titled "piuparts logs a completely
un-understandable for the casual user" (after settling the tone a
bit), but it seems I could as well amend to this one.

Thing is, I had my first contact with piuparts where something like
the following was reported:

| ERROR: FAIL: Package purging left files on system:
|  /var/lib/<package>/      not owned

And that's it.

So the questions are: Why is that an error? Where can I learn more
about it? And: What's the appropriate fix? These questions must have
been asked before several times. Please do the little effort so any
pre-existing answers can be found easily.

Snooping around by searching for "piuparts not owned" I found older
bug reports that refer to policy 6.8 and 10.8. The latter refers to
logfiles which is not the case here. The first one doesn't mention
this kind to state files. So it might be an interpretation of the
policy, result of a longer discussion. I am willing to follow but not
unless I understood what's going on here.

So, please don't leave maintainers puzzled in the dark. In comparison,
the lintian checker does a good job by providing explanative output
through an option, and also web pages for each message. For piuparts,
I was already glad if the error message contained a pointer to a
longer text for those who don't understand that short text but are
willing to learn.

    Christoph
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