msg451: point noted, we'll be discussing a better way of doing it.

Just a note on procedure: Should something fixed in svn only get into Status
"resolved"? If someone is browsing through the issues list to check for any
issues on the actual last release he will miss patches like these.

NOTE: the patch provided here is NOT the correction applied on the code. If
anyone wants that, you should checkout a diff from r689 to r690 from SVN trunk.

Fixed in revision 690. Summaries and descriptions should never be None. It was a
bug in the metadata loader.

Thanks for exploring the problem guys.

The 'None' case happens for every rpm-package which has an empty description. E.g.

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/python-psyco-1.5-2.fc4.i386.rpm

Although it is some sort of fix, I don't agree it's the best.

IMHO, the correct behavior is that the channel loader should return an empty
string ("", not None) if there is no description for the package. So we should
check the erroneous behavior on the channel loader.

What kind of channels are you using?

Another approach would be:

data = (info.getSummary() or "")

It would be a smaller change, and would result on the same effect (empty string
when info.getSummary returns None, which is erroneous, as I said before).

I think Niemeyer is the right person to abitrate on that issue.

Fixes

| Traceback (most recent call last):
|   File "/usr/bin/smart", line 194, in ?
|     main(sys.argv[1:])
|   File "/usr/bin/smart", line 167, in main
|     exitcode = iface.run(opts.command, opts.argv)
|   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/smart/interface.py", line 53, in run
|     result = _command.main(self._ctrl, opts)
|   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/smart/commands/query.py", line 283,
in main
|     if pattern.search(info.getDescription()):
| TypeError: expected string or buffer

which happens when a package has an empty %description. Ditto for summary.