to raise a exception isn't a bug

[Markus Schönhaber]

Dotan Cohen:

> The why was I, as a user, presented with a big dialogue box over my
> entire screen that told me of this exception?

Because of a bug. But not because python-apt raised an exception.

> The problem is that the
> user sees this dialogue, no matter where the programming error lies.

It's understandable that you, as an end user, want this bug to go away,
and that you don't care about the technical details that caused the bug.
The devs, OTOH, have to decide what to do - and *where* - to actually
make it go away. The bug report is filed against two packages:
python-apt and install-package. And although somewhere in python-apt the
exception you've seen is raised, it's install-package's fault not to
have handled it but shown it in big friendly letters on your screen.
In other words: python-apt did what it's supposed to do, notify
install-package of an error condition by raising an exception. Therefore
it is not to blame but the bug report is invalid wrt python-apt.
Rather install-package is to blame for not having handled the error
condition about which it was notified by python-apt. So, the bug report
is valid wrt install-package. And for install-package a fix was
released. Provided the fix works as it's supposed to, you'll never see
the exception again, although nothing was changed in python-apt.

To me it seems, this whole discussion is caused by the fact that the end
user's point of view and the developer's point of view might be
significantly different.
Florian's "to raise a exception isn't a bug" when marking the bug
against python-apt as invalid may sound snappy at first sight -
especially to an end user. But if you think about it, it's not snappy
but simply (technically) correct.

-- 
Regards
  mks