retitle 534965 ia32-apt-get breaks aptitude
severity 534965 serious
merge 534965 533746
thanks

Norbert Preining <prein...@logic.at> writes:

> Package: ia32-apt-get
> Version: 18
> Severity: grave
> Justification: renders package unusable
>
> That package was pulled in automatically by libs-i386 and it breaks
> nearly everything:
> - aptitude UI with upgrading does not work, redownloads everything again
>   and again

I know update does not work in aptitude. I wasn't aware of other
breakage. Can you provide some sort of log? This is a duplicate of
533746, merging.

> - changing /etc/apt/sources.list is not carried over to whereever that
>   package saves it dummy hosed sources.list (in /e/apt/{386,amd64})

As mentioned in NEWS and as of version 19 also in README.Debian for
the time being you need to run
  /usr/share/ia32-apt-get/convert-all-sources.list
when you change your sources.list.

> - calling apt-get update from the command line (recommended in another
>   bug report) finishes in a core dump
>   /usr/bin/apt-get: line 46: 30757 Segmentation fault      apt-get.real 
> --no-list-cleanup --no-download update

One other user managed to produce that on irc today. I can't reproduce
it and the user purged and reinstalled ia32-apt-get, thereby solving
the problem for some reason, before I could ask him to send a tar of:
  /etc/apt
  /var/lib/apt
  /var/cache/apt  (without archives/)

I don't know what causes this but something is triggering a bug in
the real apt-get. Best guess apt-get manages to break its *.bin cache
files. Maybe when it complains about the APT::Cache-Limit being too
small. Did you have to increase APT::Cache-Limit just before you got
the Segmentation fault?

> - telling the user *ONLY* in the NEWS file that we have to pin i386
>   packages otherwise they instead of the native ones will be installed
>   is *definitely* not enough. I have NOT decided to include i386 package
>   repositories in my sources.list, if ia32-apt-get adds that automatically
>   it has to make sure that this does not happen.

1) You do not just get i386 packages instead of native ones in
general. But you can on rare occasions and only in
unstable/experimental when i386 has a newer version than amd64. The
pining is only needed to prevent even those rare occasions.

2) There is also nothing I can do about this automatically as policy
forbids ia32-apt-get from changing /etc/apt/preferences, a conffile of
another package. Wether this can be improved upon depends on the apt
maintainer, for example they could add a /etc/apt/preferences.d/
directory like there is apt-conf.d/ and sources.list.d/.

3) You do have installed ia32-libs. As such you have selected to
install i386 debs on your system. ia32-apt-get extends that somewhat
and changes the way the debs are fetched but you already did choose to
install i386 debs when you selected ia32-libs however long ago that
was.

4) Unstable is as unstable says!
   You get to keep the pices.

This is a new software that only a few people (74 acording to popcon)
have used so far. There are bound to be bugs and there are bound to be
missing features. Software isn't born perfect.

> Is this a joke package? It is not April fool's day!
>
> If you prefer I will open grave bugs for each of the above.

I only consider the first issue a real bug in ia32-apt-get and adding
support for aptitude and cupt is already on my ToDo. Actually cupt
support might come first as the maintainer has already fixed some
issues preventing ia32-apt-get to work. Aptitude will need a fix for
its "update" menu entry too and I don't know how long that is going to
take to write.

MfG
        Goswin



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