Bug#1119906: dselect: Replacing available packages info, using -.

Hello again,

la 8.11.2025 klo 19.34 Guillem Jover ([email protected]) kirjoitti:
> On Sun, 2025-11-02 at 11:41:15 +0200, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> > Package: dselect
> > Version: 1.22.21
> > Severity: normal
> > X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected]
>
> > dselect displays the above on a system that has either an empty or
> > non-existent /etc/apt/sources.list file. Meanwhile dselects' APT
> > method obviously can use /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.[list|sources]
> > as normal. However, the above prompt is misleading.
>
> > Perhaps dselect should be updated to list all files found in
> > /etc/apt/sources.list[.d/*] and omit empty files?
>
> This is not related to the apt source.list files or their format. This
> is a recent change that switched the «dpkg --update-avail» invocation
> to get its input from a «apt-cache dumpavail» pipe instead of having
> to use a temporary file, which nowadays can be large.
>
>   https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/commit/4d6fcb1dddd5654e7ba8bfa2705bbb4f2c4a6884
>
> I've updated the information message in dpkg to print in this case the
> following text instead:
>
>   ,---
>   Replacing available packages information from <standard input>.
>   `---
>
> Which should be more clear, but I'm not sure whether it would help
> with the confusion reported here? Otherwise, except for completely
> suppressing the message from the apt's dselect method (in which case
> this would need to be reassigned into apt), there's not much I think
> can be done.

Having now tried this with 1.23.0, I'm not sure that this text line
accomplishes much.

Hit:1 http://repos.internal/debian unstable InRelease
Hit:2 https://deb.debian.org/debian unstable InRelease
Hit:3 https://deb.debian.org/debian-debug unstable-debug InRelease
Reading package lists... Done
Merging available information
Replacing available packages information from <standard input>.
Information about 93049 packages was updated.

IMHO, this could be reduced to (note added punctuation):

Hit:1 http://repos.internal/debian unstable InRelease
Hit:2 https://deb.debian.org/debian unstable InRelease
Hit:3 https://deb.debian.org/debian-debug unstable-debug InRelease
Reading package lists... Done.
Merging available information.
Updating available packages list.
Information about 93049 packages was updated.

Martin-Éric