[Aptitude-devel] Bug#755677: aptitude: Recognizes "Debian Backports" packages as official for downloading changelogs on the CLI, but not in the TUI

[Samuel Bronson]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2014 12:21:26 +0200 Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org> wrote:
> Package: aptitude
> Version: 0.6.11-1
> Control: found -1 0.6.8.2-1
>
> Hi,
>
> I actually ran into the following on Debian Wheezy, but then also was
> able to reproduce this in Sid:
>
> If I try to download and view the changelog of a package from an
> official "Debian Backports" repository
> (e.g. http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/r/redmine/wheezy-backports_changelog,
> the repository's release identification is
> "release v=,o=Debian Backports,a=wheezy-backports,n=wheezy-backports,l=Debian Backports,c=main")
> in the NCurses TUI by pressing "Shift-C", aptitude currently claims, it's
> not an official package: "You can only view changelogs of official
> Debian packages."
>
> And yes, there is a related fix in Sid (https://bugs.debian.org/714619),
> but only in one place out of two as it seems: only for the command line
> interface.  And indeed, if I do the same from the command line on Sid,
> it works as expected, at least in Sid: "aptitude changelog
> redmine=2.5.1-2\~bpo70+2" works fine.

In addition to the places you spotted:

> src/cmdline/cmdline_changelog.cc
> src/view_changelog.cc

when I searched just now, grepping for \"Debian\", I also get one for
the GTK frontend:

src/gtk/changelog.cc:639:      if(origins.find("Debian") == origins.end())

Also, trying to see what aptitude SHOULD do, I discovered that apt-get
hardcodes several functions for this, covering 176 lines, in
apt-get.cc <http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/apt/apt.git/tree/cmdline/apt-get.cc?id=d01fa806061db7f5d227a0784405987c78998c84#n1409>,
rather than having library functionality for this. Nasty!