Thanks for replying. I get the rationale, but I'd like to find some kind of better solution here.
DonKult just pointed out to me on IRC that I can get the output I want with an "apt-cache show" instead of "apt show". Which is great. But it exposes a different problem: "apt" and "apt-get","apt-cache" and friends act VERY similarly, but have unclear differences. Before DonKult told me about "apt-cache show" just now, I had assumed that "apt show" was a synonym. And if I, a Debian user for decades and a DD am confused by this, we can probably assume that almost everybody else is too. This is probably a bigger discussion than this bug. There are ways to improve this. For instance, you can have "apt show package" limit itself to commonly-used fields (what it does today), with an extra note at the bottom: N: Additional fields are displayed with -v And "apt show -v package" would show everything (this is what "apt-cache show" does?). "apt show" already has N: notes at the bottom, so this would be consistent with the way it works today. Adding more docs to the manpage wouldn't help: the tools take identical options and produce 99% identical output. Anybody who sees that would just assume the tools are the same. Thanks
