Bug#859612: devscripts: Very unhelp error message from grep-excuses if wget fails to download excuses

[Niels Thykier]

Package: devscripts
Version: 2.17.5
Severity: minor

Hi,

If grep-excuses fails to download the excuses from release.d.o, it
provides the folloing error message:

"""
$ grep-excuses foo
grep-excuses: fetch https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/autoremovals.cgi failed (4 )

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
grep-excuses: read/zcat failed: 
"""

Prior to the autoremovals support, it would just have:

"""
$ grep-excuses foo

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
grep-excuses: read/zcat failed: 
"""

This is very unhelpful for figuring out what went wrong.  Especially,
when grep-excuses is called as a part of another script (e.g. the
release team has a "diff-helper" tool on respighi + coccia that runs
grep-excuses, look up hints from other members and computes a diff of
a given package).

Note that this problem is *very* common on debian.org hosts, where DSA
typically change the root trust store.  There, the user typically have
to add "ca_directory=/etc/ssl/ca-debian" to their ~/.wgetrc for
grep-excuses to work.

Thanks,
~Niels