On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:41:11 +0200
"era eriksson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
0> vnix$ dlocate -s mail-transport-agent
1> Package: mail-transport-agent (virtual)
2> Providers: exim4-daemon-heavy, exim4-daemon-light, postfix, courier-mta ...
3>
4> Package: postfix
5> Status: install ok installed
6> Priority: extra
7> Section: mail
Many good ideas. Adding the blank line looks better. "Providers:" is
also better, as is your reordering.
Duplicate fields: both line #1 and #4 begin with "Package:".
The trailing "(virtual)" makes searching and parsing harder; for
instance, 'sed'ing or 'grep'ing for anything in parenthesis means extra
quoting.
If spaces in tags are avoided, then a hyphen might do:
Virtual-Package: mail-transport-agent
> Not sure if Providers: should be comma-separated (cf. Depends:) or
> space-separated or even pipe-separated (again, cf. how equally valid
> alternatives are shown in Depends:) or what.
Pipes seem ideal, since for '.deb's they mean XOR.
Interesting point about 'dlocate' having its own conventions for switch
syntax. Instead of '-v' then, any mnemonic suggesting 'Virtual' would
do -- oddly enough, '-v' at present isn't used by 'dlocate', and 'v'
is the first letter of 'virtual'. Yet having '-v', (or whatever it
ought to be called, probably NOT '-v' as that would confuse users
accustomed to it meaning 'verbose'), as a general tag is tricky for
users who seldom know if a package is virtual until after running
'dlocate'. Maybe '-v' could fail unless the package was virtual, in
which case it would output just its VP provider's 'Description:'
fields.
Aside from that conundrum, what we have now is:
0> % dlocate -s mail-transport-agent
1> Virtual-Package: mail-transport-agent
2> Providers: exim4-daemon-heavy | exim4-daemon-light | postfix | courier-mta
...
3>
4> Package: postfix
5> Status: install ok installed
6> Priority: extra
7> Section: mail
...
HTH...
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