[Aptitude-devel] Bug#349414: aptitude: missing format string %-escape for the archive of the installed version

[Daniel Hartwig]

Control: tags -1 = wontfix

On 21 February 2014 06:05, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo
<manuel.montezelo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
>
> Hi,
>
> The reason why this is not straightforward, as far as I can tell, is
> because there's no place where this information is saved.
>

Right.  Archives are sources of new packages and updates, and should
only be thought of in those terms.  It is complex and not that useful
to reason in terms of which archive did some installed package come
from.

There is also no search term for this, and neither should there be.

> Packages can be installed by several means, including by hand with
> dpkg, and in the basic information (.deb itself, or Packages files
> separately) there is no information about where it came from.  I think
> that apt (and aptitude through libapt) extract this information from
> the content of /var/lib/apt/lists/ , that is, the set of Packages
> coming from whatever is enabled in your sources.list, mapping
> backwards the candidate version to the source of the Packages file
> where the version appears.
>
> For packages installed by hand or obsolete (installed through regular
> repositories/mirrors but not present anymore in the Packages list of
> the repository), this information is not present anywhere in the
> system at the moment (again, as far as I can tell).
>
> So I think it would not be an easy undertaking in the way in which
> things work at the moment.
>

Lots of work for a complicated implementation, just to support a
reasoning model which is also complicated and not that useful.

> Opinions about what to do?
>

Nothing.