[Reportbug-maint] Bug#502860: reportbug: Gets wrong maintainer for no longer installed packages

Raphael Hertzog hertzog at debian.org
Mon Oct 20 14:52:09 UTC 2008


On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Sandro Tosi wrote:
> Hello Ansgar,
> 
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 13:23, Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar at 2008.43-1.org> wrote:
> > Reportbug sometimes looks up the wrong maintainer for packages that have
> > been removed from the system.
> >
> > The output from "dpkg --print-avail" can be wrong if the package is no longer
> > installed.  Reportbug should not use this information for these packages.  For
> > example on my system I get this:
> 
> But isn't it a bug in dpkg then? I can feel like --print-avail should
> print only "available" package, and nntp was no longer available on
> your system. I can't think an easy way to fix this if not switching to
> apt-cache or some other tool.

Don't use "dpkg --print-avail" it reports only outdated information in
most cases as the available file is only a left-over from dselect
and as such it's almost guaranteed to not be up-to-date. There's a warning
in the man page in the git repository documenting this limitation already.

Use apt-cache is my suggestion.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/





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