[Reportbug-maint] Bug#493049: Bug#493049: reportbug: text width and dependencies status

[Sandro Tosi]

Ciao Riccardo,

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 02:24, Riccardo Stagni <unriccio at email.it> wrote:
> Package: reportbug
> Version: 3.44
> Severity: normal
>
> reportbug attaches to every report the status of those packages the
> offending program depends on, but the informations are shown trimming
> the text width to 79 characters.
>
> Funny things happen if package names/versions are overwhelming long
> (see the attached file for a reportbug run against openoffice, in
> particolar the openoffice.org suggests)

This is a conservative setup: there are still many MTA that wrap
emails at 80th char, or MUA on terminals limited to 80 chars, so
having that informations stored in 80 columns is helpful for the
maintainer to have a "snapshot" of the installed package in his/her
full screen.

Moreover, those are info needed by the maintainer to know what
packages are installed on your system, so cutting off some of the
package name or description is usually safe, since the maint knows
enught about the package to map the cutted name to the real package
name.

Anyhow, what would be your suggestion? take the whole dpkg -l <pkg>
and use it for the report?

Cheers,
Sandro

-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, Morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi