gnome-terminal ellipses inconsistency

[Boštjan Mejak]

I have noticed that the Terminal in Ubuntu is kind of inconsistent when it comes to printing out the ellipses. Let me give you two examples:

(1) Reading package lists... Done
(2) Processing triggers for man-db ...

I expect for the second example to be printed out as this:

(2) Processing triggers for man-db...

Why put a space before the ellipsis? There are many cases where this inconsistency is obvious if you install a package. It would be nice to see all the ellipses stick to the last word, not separated away from it by a space. Is this fixable?

[David Kalnischkies (donkult)]

(2) should be a message from dpkg, so reassign there, but typography rules change between languages, so this might be an issue in the translation instead.

(In the untranslated text in the code the ellipse is usually '...' (three dots in a row) while in a translation you could use the 'real' character '…' )

[Raphaël Hertzog (hertzog)]

Sticking the ellipsis to the last word makes it impossible to select the last word by double clicking on it. It's also more difficult to parse for scripts. It's not a big deal when the word before the ellipsis is just an English word, but when it's a dynamic value like in this case, I believe it's not very nice to stick the ellipsis.

Note that dpkg always puts a space before its ellipsis, so it's consistent within dpkg.

(Reading database ... 335598 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace zim 0.54-1 (using .../build-area/zim_0.54-1_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement zim ...
Setting up zim (0.54-1) ...
Processing triggers for shared-mime-info ...

[Boštjan Mejak (bostjan.mejak)]

I would rather see apt following dpkg in this regard. It looks better with a space before the ellipsis as I have looked more closely now (not when writing text like this though). I just want this things to be consistent, otherwise it bothers me...