[Aptitude-devel] Bug#687678: aptitude: ignores setting of pkgCacheFile::Generate

[Daniel Hartwig]

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.6.8.1-1
Severity: normal

Dear Aptitude and APT developers,

The setting pkgCacheFile::Generate is used to determine whether the
package cache should be generated or not at various points.  If this
setting is “false” and the cache is not available (or old) then
creating an instance of pkgCacheFile fails.  This behaviour is
standard for all apt-utils and I assume also other libapt-pkg
consumers.

apt-get additionally uses the setting to determine whether or not to
rebuild the cache after an update.  This was introduced in apt 0.9.1.

apt-cache has it's own setting to override the default:
APT::Cache::Generate.

In aptitude this setting is completely ignored.  Whether or not this
should be considered broken is something I have yet to determine.  At
the very least our use case is different in the interactive setting
where it may be required to always rebuild the cache after an update.

This appears to be an exceptional setting so perhaps it is best to
always respect it, and abort with errors as appropriate.

The setting appears to have been introduced here:

revno: 1964.3.24
committer: David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies at gmail.com>
branch nick: apt-sid
timestamp: Fri 2010-06-04 22:58:57 +0200
message:
  store also the SourceList we use internally for export

with apt-get being updated later.  A brief comment from the APT
developers on whether aptitude should respect this setting would be
appreciated.

Regards