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

[Sandro Tosi]

retitle 502860 use python-apt instead of dpkg for pkgs info
thanks

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 16:52, Raphael Hertzog <hertzog at debian.org> wrote:
> 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 Don't use "dpkg --print-avail" it reports only outdated information in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.

Thanks Raphael for highlight this to me; maybe the best solution is to
replace all the code that "exec dpkg + parse output" to python-apt
(even if this interface really needs a better documentation than now)

Cheers,
Sandro

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