Errors with dummy packages

[John H Palmieri]

While testing out a ticket, I accidentally asked Sage to build some of its fake packages, like pandoc or perl_cpan_polymake_prereq. (Well, I asked it to build packages for which these were dependencies.) These fail with messages like

Error: pandoc is a dummy script package that the Sage distribution uses
to provide information about equivalent system packages.
It cannot be installed using the Sage distribution.
Please install it manually, for example using the system packages
recommended at the end of a run of './configure'
See below for package-specific information.

...

Unfortunately, this message is buried in `logs/install.log` and appears in no file in `logs/pkgs`, so when the build fails, Sage can't identify the problematic package, and you have to comb through `install.log` to find it. Could dummy packages write proper logs with error messages so that the build process can identify what's going wrong?

[Matthias Koeppe]

That's a good idea, please open a ticket