Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Matthias Klumpp]

Am Sa., 25. Aug. 2018 um 22:39 Uhr schrieb Alan W. Irwin
:
>
> For those (like me, it is a long story) who want to delay doing a full
> system update of Buster, I confirm that
>
> apt-get install --reinstall libappstream4
>
> fixed this severe problem in Debian Buster for me.
>
> I am surprised this issue migrated from Debian unstable to Buster at
> all.  According to ,
> 0.12.2-1 (the version with this severe bug that affects all apt-get
> updates) [...]

The bug was in there for a really long time, but it needed the right
conditions to be exposed. In this case it was the "stellarium" package
being updated with a new version that had an empty content_rating XML
tag, which resulted in some chaos in libappstream's caching code which
relied on list items being there to guess the right container type.

Cheers,
Matthias

-- 
I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/

Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Alan W. Irwin]

For those (like me, it is a long story) who want to delay doing a full
system update of Buster, I confirm that

apt-get install --reinstall libappstream4

fixed this severe problem in Debian Buster for me.

I am surprised this issue migrated from Debian unstable to Buster at
all.  According to ,
0.12.2-1 (the version with this severe bug that affects all apt-get
updates) was accepted into unstable on 2018-08-04 and only migrated to
Buster on 2018-08-15.  So there were 11 days when any user that ran
"apt-get update" for unstable would have seen the effects of this
severe bug.  But apparently no report of the issue occurred which
means that the whole point of Debian unstable (to winnow out the
showstopper bugs before they hit Debian testing = Buster) broke down
in this particular case.

That said, kudos to Matthias Klumpp for quickly fixing this severe bug once
a Debian Buster user had reported it.

Alan
__
Alan W. Irwin

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__

Linux-powered Science
__

Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Matthias Klumpp]

Source: appstream
Source-Version: 0.12.2-2

> Am Fr., 24. Aug. 2018 um 16:02 Uhr schrieb Christoph Berg :
> Re: Matthias Klumpp 2018-08-24 
> 
> > Can you verify the issue is fixed when you upgrade the library?
>
> I'm not seeing any error messages anymore with a fully uptodate buster
> system.

Okay, marking as fixed again.

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Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Christoph Berg]

Re: Matthias Klumpp 2018-08-24 

> Can you verify the issue is fixed when you upgrade the library?

I'm not seeing any error messages anymore with a fully uptodate buster
system.

Christoph

Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Matthias Klumpp]

Am Fr., 24. Aug. 2018 um 15:14 Uhr schrieb Christoph Berg :
>
> Re: Matthias Klumpp 2018-08-24 
> 
> > Are you *sure* that you upgraded *completely*? The fix is in
> > libappstream4, and so far all occurrences where people still had the
> > bug came from incomplete upgrades. Please check that you really also
> > have libappstream4 >= 0.12.2-2.
>
> I did only upgrade appstream. If that's not enough, you need stricter
> dependencies. (And the "| true" is still wrong.)

The | true is fixed in master. I don't need stricter dependencies,
because this bug was fixed in src:appstream, not in the appstream
binary package. People need to update their systems fully, or at least
update the right package.
The appstream binary package will work with any of the library
versions, artificially tightening the dependency would reduce
flexibility for users and make calculating upgrade solutions harder
for APT.

Can you verify the issue is fixed when you upgrade the library?

Cheers,
Matthias

-- 
I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/

Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Christoph Berg]

Re: Matthias Klumpp 2018-08-24 

> Are you *sure* that you upgraded *completely*? The fix is in
> libappstream4, and so far all occurrences where people still had the
> bug came from incomplete upgrades. Please check that you really also
> have libappstream4 >= 0.12.2-2.

I did only upgrade appstream. If that's not enough, you need stricter
dependencies. (And the "| true" is still wrong.)

Christoph

Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Matthias Klumpp]

Am Fr., 24. Aug. 2018 um 10:24 Uhr schrieb Christoph Berg :
>
> Control: reopen -1
> Control: found -1 0.12.2-2
> Control: severity -1 important
>
> Re: Johannes Winter 2018-08-23 <20180823115724.64e93...@radell.fritz.box>
> > After upgrading appstream to 0.12.2-2 the problem still persists on
> > debian sid.
>
> The problem is still there with 0.12.2-2:
>
> $ sudo apt-get update
> OK:1 http://mirror.credativ.com/debian buster InRelease
> OK:2 http://mirror.credativ.com/debian sid InRelease
>
> (appstreamcli:23049): GLib-CRITICAL **: 10:15:52.594: g_variant_builder_end: 
> assertion '!GVSB(builder)->uniform_item_types || 
> GVSB(builder)->prev_item_type != NULL || g_variant_type_is_definite 
> (GVSB(builder)->type)' failed
>
> (appstreamcli:23049): GLib-CRITICAL **: 10:15:52.594: g_variant_new_variant: 
> assertion 'value != NULL' failed
>
> (appstreamcli:23049): GLib-ERROR **: 10:15:52.594: g_variant_new_parsed: 
> 11-13:invalid GVariant format string
> Trace/breakpoint trap
> Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig
> Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut.
> Statusinformationen werden eingelesen Fertig
> Aktualisierung für 384 Pakete verfügbar. Führen Sie »apt list --upgradable« 
> aus, um sie anzuzeigen.
> [...]

Are you *sure* that you upgraded *completely*? The fix is in
libappstream4, and so far all occurrences where people still had the
bug came from incomplete upgrades. Please check that you really also
have libappstream4 >= 0.12.2-2.
Frankly, this is getting a bit annoying now, and I am considering to
pass -V to dh_makeshlibdeps to enforce strict dependencies (which will
make the whole package less flexible).

Cheers,
Matthias

-- 
I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/

Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Christoph Berg]

Control: reopen -1
Control: found -1 0.12.2-2
Control: severity -1 important

Re: Johannes Winter 2018-08-23 <20180823115724.64e93...@radell.fritz.box>
> After upgrading appstream to 0.12.2-2 the problem still persists on
> debian sid.

The problem is still there with 0.12.2-2:

$ sudo apt-get update
OK:1 http://mirror.credativ.com/debian buster InRelease
OK:2 http://mirror.credativ.com/debian sid InRelease

(appstreamcli:23049): GLib-CRITICAL **: 10:15:52.594: g_variant_builder_end: 
assertion '!GVSB(builder)->uniform_item_types || GVSB(builder)->prev_item_type 
!= NULL || g_variant_type_is_definite (GVSB(builder)->type)' failed

(appstreamcli:23049): GLib-CRITICAL **: 10:15:52.594: g_variant_new_variant: 
assertion 'value != NULL' failed

(appstreamcli:23049): GLib-ERROR **: 10:15:52.594: g_variant_new_parsed: 
11-13:invalid GVariant format string
Trace/breakpoint trap
Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut.
Statusinformationen werden eingelesen Fertig
Aktualisierung für 384 Pakete verfügbar. Führen Sie »apt list --upgradable« 
aus, um sie anzuzeigen.


The shell syntax is wrong:

APT::Update::Post-Invoke-Success {
"if /usr/bin/test -w /var/cache/app-info -a -e /usr/bin/appstreamcli; then 
appstreamcli refresh-cache > /dev/null | true; fi";
};

(| instead of ||)


I'm downgrading to important because "apt-get update" no longer exits
with status 100, but it's still a very annoying message to see.


Re: Johannes Winter 2018-08-23 <20180823122729.50f50...@radell.fritz.box>
> After full upgrade the error disappeared...

That means that appstream is missing some dependencies.

Christoph

Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[Johannes Winter]

After upgrading appstream to 0.12.2-2 the problem still persists on
debian sid.

Bug#906538: Possibly still not fixed

[antoszka]

I'm running Kali Linux, but as far as this bug is concerned that shouldn't
matter, I'm still hitting the issue after manually upgrading to 0.12.2. I've
pasted code in the github issue [1].

[1] https://github.com/ximion/appstream/issues/198#issuecomment-414211767