Posting here in case this might help others who may be encountering the
same problem.
I really appreciate the enhanced security provided for apt in the new
release. But one of the changes caused me a small headache in upgrading.
Following the upgrade, running `apt get update' resulted in this
warning:
Reading package lists... Done
W: Download is performed unsandboxed as root as file
'/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/deb.debian.org_debian_dists_stretch_InRelease'
couldn't be accessed by user '_apt'. - pkgAcquire::Run (13: Permission
denied)
which meant, I suppose, that I wasn't getting all the benefits of the new
regime. After a bit of reading and a lot of trial and error I was able, I
think, to resolve the issue by manually changing the owner attribute of
the directory /var/lib/apt/lists/:
chown -R _apt.root lists
(executed in /var/lib/apt/ )
It doesn't seem to be enough to have /var/lib/apt/lists set to rwxr_xr_x
if it's owned by root.
If anyone has a different or better solution, I'd be curious to hear about
it,
Jim
