On Mon, Sep 1, 2025 at 8:29 AM Vincent Lefevre <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2025-09-01 13:55:55 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > Note that I don't know *when* this symbolic link has been removed > > (unfortunately, the logs don't say anything about it). So it could > > have potentially been done by the purge of tracker-extract while > > this symbolic link is now managed by localsearch. So, a bug in the > > old tracker-extract package. > > I could reproduce the issue after removing localsearch and > reinstalling tracker-extract/stable (3.8.2-4+b1). > > If both localsearch and tracker-extract are upgraded to 3.8.2-6 and > tracker-extract 3.8.2-6 is purged afterwards, then the symbolic link > is preserved. > > But if tracker-extract is removed without being upgraded first > (this occurs with aptitude, which detects that tracker-extract > is no longer needed from dependencies[*]), then the symbolic link > is removed when tracker-extract is purged. So this is a bug in > either localsearch 3.8.2-6 or tracker-extract 3.8.2-4.
Before today, I had not used aptitude in many years. I was unable to figure out how to trigger the behavior you saw with aptitude. Please provide detailed instructions for how to reproduce this. I am uploading localsearch 3.8.2-8 to Unstable now and it will quickly migrate to Testing. In this version, I have moved the files from the localsearch binary package back to tracker-extract, avoiding this problem for people upgrading from Debian 13 to Unstable after this version is built. Debian Testing was never affected. I believe we ultimately do want to rename the package because nothing in Debian 13 depends on tracker-extract directly; they all depend on localsearch which is provided by tracker-extract. Having localsearch go from a virtual package in Debian 13 to a transitional package in Forky feels backwards but is a helpful mitigation that could be done immediately. To fix the issue here, we might need to do a Debian 13 stable update to modify the maintainer scripts. I will likely need to upload a version of localsearch with the rename to Experimental to make it easier to reproduce the failed upgrade and fix it. Or maybe we could use Debusine or another apt repository. I was able to reproduce the issue with sudo apt dist-upgrade --auto-remove --purge. However, that is not the default or typical behavior for using apt and I think it could be risky to adjust maintainer scripts to accommodate that use case. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
