[Aptitude-devel] Bug#710587: Bug#710587: aptitude: unable to purge a package

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2015-09-09 7:07 GMT+01:00 David Kalnischkies <david at kalnischkies.de>:
> On Tue, Sep 08, 2015 at 03:40:20PM +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
>> Is this with multi-arch enabled?  gnotski is now a transitional package,
>> arch all, added on 25 May 2013 (very close to when the bug report
>> happened), it must have been arch-dependent before.
> […]
>> So I am not sure about what was wrong at the time, but I think that this
>> bug is not present anymore.
>
> This sounds like this bug:
> https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/apt/apt.git/commit/?id=016bea8214e1826b289025f03890f70a5805db87
> Note that it is only in /experimental, so with /unstable it should be
> reproducible if its really this issue.

Thanks for the input, David.  I also think that this is the cause of
this bug report.

In experimental... do you mean that it's been only added in apt-1.1,
never released to unstable yet?  By the date I thought that it made it
to the last stable release, Jessie.  Or is it one of these changes
that you requested but weren't approved by the release team?


In any case, after this information, I don't know if we should reopen
this or not.

The original systems where this was found already changed state, and
at least in one they use unstable and experimental.  The last report
was in in 2014, more than a year ago, and the submitters didn't
consider this a problem anymore (so I assume that it got fixed in
their system somehow, possibly because they use the experimental
versions; or maybe they purged by hand by dpkg and forgot about it,
or...).

If I  try to reproduce it and confirm the behaviour, and we suppose
that it was the same as the original problem (sounds like it, with the
package converted to an arch:all meta-package), then we must conclude
that it was an apt bug and reassign... but you already know and fixed
this, so other than for neat bookeeping, it's of not much use.  (But
if you want to steal the bug report from us, fine for me :-) ).

If we suppose that it was or /could be/ a different problem, and leave
the bug open just in case, but do not get more input from the
submitters, we will never actually confirm if that was the bug that
they hit or if it was another different condition.  And in practice, I
imagine that it will happen like other bugs: not be addressed for
years until we close it anyway.

I think that it's better to leave it closed, but is is good to confirm
that this issue was very likely the cause behind it.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>