Comment 4 for bug 801601

Jeremy, I think you've made a mistake :(. It would help if we had a one-line explanation for why you a) confirmed the bug (including your OS version and desktop environment) and b) reassigned it. For myself, I will try to clarify - it's a bit messy.

What I started to report was that this link didn't work on my system. But that wasn't a bug. The link didn't work because that documentation wasn't installed - because I'd deliberately chosen not to install it. That's cool.

yelp then tried to find out which package I need to install, if I want to read that documentation:

    Search for packages containing this document

I clicked on it, but got

    The files could not be found in any package

The bug is that last line. [I believe that installing the ubuntu/gnome user manuals does "fix" the link - I've certainly seen it working at some point. So in theory it should be possible to reproduce by uninstalling the ubuntu/gnome manual.]

As a disclaimer, it might be relevant that, despite running under GNOME, the installer that appeared to deliver this error message was KPackageKit, not the GNOME PackageKit. I don't know how the URL "ghelp:gnome-help?a11y#a11y" is supposed to be resolved to a specific package.

In fact, I don't know how that error message could be generated at all. I believe APT doesn't know what files are in a package until you install it. My speculation is that PackgeKit assumes a system like YUM (RPM), which has built-in support for searching the files of uninstalled packages.

Ooh... I see there actually is an apt-file command that can do this. I wonder how it works. But it's not present on my current minimal install. So that's another possibility - but if it's really the case that apt-file was necessary, and PackageKit is searching for packages anyway, it seems like it ought to offer to install that first.