On Sat, Sep 23, 2006 at 01:20:42AM +0200, Tomas Pospisek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
was heard to say:
> On Thu, 21 Sep 2006, Daniel Burrows wrote:
>
> > Does the behavior improve if you start aptitude with the option
> >"-o Aptitude::Parse-Description-Bullets=true"?
>
> Beautiful!
>
> > PS: see bug #373888.
>
> Ummm ... I can understand that removing the last line ("+ ... and more")
> is a bug and should be avoided, however:
>
> "b.) The squeezing of the multiple spaces after the + is unpredicted and
> can cause additional problem with formating."
>
> I can understand that this *could* pose problems, however is there
> any *actual* example(s) where it *does* cause formatting problems?
There are two real problems:
(1) aptitude was collapsing all the spaces in the first line, preventing
you from using any sort of explicit formatting in lists. This has
been fixed (lists won't be recognized unless there's exactly one
space following the bullet, but that's usually the case).
(2) The bulletting scheme cannot distinguish between a full stop at the
beginning of a legitimate line of text and a syntactically
significant full stop. Since these periods may occur after other
text or after two spaces, the standard description algorithm will
not strip this text -- meaning that aptitude will massively mangle
a description that displays just fine in the standard formatting.
Worse, you need to know about aptitude's formatting to get this right;
full-stops after indentation are just fine everywhere else, but not
if you've written a bulletted list. I presume that most Debian
developers aren't even aware aptitude exists, and even if they do, they
aren't going to be intimately familiar with its description parsing
algorithm. I can't really defend a feature that's likely to lead to
surprising and undesired results.
This actually occurred in the example that led to bug #373888, and
at a quick check there's one other package (flac) that has this
problem.
I wasn't able to find any satisfactory solution to this problem.
Daniel
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