Hello, would it be better for this bug to be reassigned to packagekit? As was mentioned earlier, it seems like apt is working as expected - if there is no new InRelease file, it doesn't bother updating the index. The issue seems to be that packagekit is fetching the InRelease file but not the rest, leaving apt in an unexpected state.
I just experienced this bug on 2 of my 4 Debian systems all of which had GNOME Software configured to automatically fetch updates. I regularly updated my systems from both the command line and through Software. However, the 2 that were not affected stay running 24/7 and have unattended-upgrades set up, which I imagine would refresh the package index before packagekit had a chance to break it (although I've disabled it now). The fix I found was to stop GNOME Software from automatically refreshing and downloading packages (time will tell if this fixes the issue going forward). In order to clear /var/lib/apt/lists/ I disabled all of my sources, ran apt update, and then re-enabled them. I imagine simply deleting the contents of the directory would work too. After that I started seeing the expected updates. Again, I feel that this is really a packagkit issue at heart, and perhaps it could be reassigned. Thanks, Jonathan
