Hi! On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 18:04:39 +0200, Santiago Vila wrote: > Package: dpkg > Version: 1.17.13
> I fear that this has been the behaviour of dpkg for a long time, but > nevertheless, I think it is a bug and should be fixed. > > When I use dpkg --no-act, dpkg shows messages on stderr, and I can't > just do this: > > dpkg --no-act --purge somepackage | less > > If I tell a program to do something and the program can't do that, > that's an error. In this case, however, I'm merely asking dpkg what he > would do, so the messages are not of the "sorry, I can't do that" type, > but instead "Look, this is what I would do". Could you provide an actual example of the problematic output to know what do you think is misbehaving? Because if I do this on say fbset, I get on stdout: ,--- (Reading database ... 219138 files and directories currently installed.) Would remove or purge fbset (2.1-28) ... `--- but if I do this on dpkg I get something like this on stderr: ,--- dpkg: error processing package dpkg (--purge): this is an essential package; it should not be removed Errors were encountered while processing: dpkg `--- Is stuff like that what you perceive as an issue? > For this reason, I believe these messages (and, in general, any program > with --no-act, --dry-run or equivalent options) should be shown on stdout, > as they are not really errors. For me the only difference between the two is that it's acting the same except that it does not perform any actual modification (as documented in the man page), so at least the above two examples make perfect sense to me. :) Thanks, Guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
