ruby-commandline [0.7.10-13] (quantal) -- ERROR: comparison of String with 10 failed

PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu quantal (12.10)"
VERSION="12.10, Quantal Quetzal"

Package: ruby-commandline
Priority: optional
Section: ruby
Installed-Size: 96
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <email address hidden>
Architecture: all
Version: 0.7.10-13
Ruby-Versions: ruby1.9.1 ruby1.8

After installing dhelp which uses ruby, I was frequently seeing during package installation the error message

ERROR: comparison of String with 10 failed

following the invocation of dhelp information processing for the particular package.

In fact, just invoking dhelp_parse at the command line produces the error message

 dhelp_parse
ERROR: comparison of String with 10 failed

After investigation, it was ascertained that this error was due to console width
being obtained from the environmental variable COLUMNS in the form of a string
and not being automatically converted to an integer.

Therefore the following fix of changing console width from a string to an integer needed to be applied to

/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/commandline/application.rb

--- application.rb.OLD 2012-05-30 12:59:59.000000000 +0200
+++ application.rb.NEW 2012-05-30 12:59:59.000000000 +0200
@@ -336,6 +336,7 @@
     # Formatting defaults
     #
     console_width = ENV["COLUMNS"]
+ console_width = console_width.to_i
     @columns =
       if console_width.nil?
         DEFAULT_CONSOLE_WIDTH

and to

/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/commandline/optionparser/optionparser.rb

--- optionparser.rb.OLD 2012-05-30 12:59:59.000000000 +0200
+++ optionparser.rb.NEW 2012-05-30 12:59:59.000000000 +0200
@@ -67,6 +67,7 @@
     # Formatting defaults
     #
     console_width = ENV["COLUMNS"]
+ console_width = console_width.to_i
     @columns =
       if console_width.nil?
         DEFAULT_CONSOLE_WIDTH

in order to ensure that in both cases the comparison test was being done on console width in the form of an integer.

Having applied this changes, dhelp_parse then works without error.

dhelp_parse
 Usage: dhelp_parse [-v] [-h] -a doc-base_file1 d-b_f2 ... | -d doc-base_file1 d-b_f2 ... | -i | -r