[Aptitude-devel] Bug#598428: broken release file for one source completely breaks updates

[Jakob Bohm]

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.6.3-3.2+squeeze1
Severity: important


Just reporting that this bug is still present in 0.6.3-3.2+squeeze1

P.S.

Supplemental comment on why I agree with the original reporter
that this is an Important class bug (besides the formal
justification that it can break the whole system).

The usage scenario most likely to trigger this bug is having an
out of date site local mirror of one of the time-sensitive
archives (security, volatile or backports) and listing that
before its upstream in sources.list (so package files in the
local mirror can get downloaded without incurring bandwidth
costs on the outside line, while not missing more recent
updates not yet in the local mirror, I am aware that this might
only work on days when the local mirror is up to date, but it
still saves on total bandwidth costs).

In that scenario, the abortive behavior causes aptitude to
sometimes think large parts of Debian don't exist, resulting
in meaningless upgrade/downgrade/removal suggestions, such as
wanting to upgrade all packages to their backports variants
when this bug prevents download of the non-expired package
files of the main Debian archive.