Package: less Version: 418-1 Severity: serious Justification: Unsuitable for release because of unexpected behavior
$ echo "This is a plain text file" >test.deb $ less test.deb test.deb: *** Contents: test.deb (END) Doing the same on an Etch system does show the contents correctly: $ echo "This is a plain text file" >test.deb $ less test.deb This is a plain text file test.deb (END) Having the ability to show the contents of a Debian package is nice, but IMO the current implementation is seriously broken for the following reasons: - apparently it assumes that any file with the extention .deb or .udeb is a Debian package file, which is the Windows way of doing things; the Linux (and only correct) way of determining the file type is by checking the "magic numbers" in a file - the current behavior violates the rule of "least surprise": if I use less on a Debian package and get garbled output, that's not strange; however, if I use less on a plain text file and I only get '*** Contents:', it leads to the assumption that the file is broken I saw this issue while working with the experimental busybox source package, which has three configuration files: config.deb, config.udeb and config.static (IMO a sensible naming scheme). The fact that I did not see the contents of the first two confused me a lot and eventually cost a few hours of both my time and of others [1]. Please revert this feature until it can be implemented correctly to checks the actual file type. Cheers, FJP [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2008/03/msg00223.html -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-rc5 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages less depends on: ii debianutils 2.28.4 Miscellaneous utilities specific t ii libc6 2.7-9 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libncurses5 5.6+20080203-1 Shared libraries for terminal hand less recommends no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
