Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> Thanks for your followup and patch. (Please feel free to base
> your patches on top of the pkg-util-linux git repo, see:
> debcheckout util-linux)
Sorry, I can just about cope with subversion, but I'll never
understand git.
>> What happened to findmnt(8)?
>
> It was likely added later (but before my time). While all the other
> utilities in the "mount" package is linux-only, the findmnt utility
> should probably live in an arch:any package like util-linux instead.
Wait, so mount doesn't exist for kfreebsd but util-linux does? Okay,
I hadn't expected that.
[...]
> I can acknowledge that it might be useful to be decent against users
> who do not know about the existance of apt-file and how to use it,
> but also don't think the list in the description needs to be extensive
> just as long as it contains the most promiment and
> likely-to-be-searched-for utilities. Since these packages are essential
> I wonder who would ever search for findmnt, since it's pretty much
> guaranteed it's already installed on every users system already.
Which in fact means it doesn't even need apt-file - "dpkg -L" is
enough. Yes, for Essential packages the description doesn't have its
usual policy-mandated function of providing enough information to let
a user decide whether they need the package installed - they just seem
to adhere to that guideline because it's easier than coming up with a
different one!
(This problem of stale lists of utilities in package descriptions
comes up often enough that I'm surprised there isn't a dh_list or
something...)
> A more useful patch would probably be to completely revamp the
> mount package description.
One alternative approach is to list the utilities *and* their man page
short descriptions, which makes them easier to search for - "oh,
findmnt sounds like what I want and apparently I've already got that
installed". Or... well, I was going to suggest that another option
is to expand the short description and explain the package name, which
would look something like this:
This package provides a set of tools for dealing with different kinds
of filesystem, including the essential utility "mount", which is
responsible for assembling a system's filesystem hierarchy.
but then it makes me wonder whether a swap partition, swapfile, or
loopback device technically counts as a filesystem...
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
