[Aptitude-devel] Bug#798320: aptitude: returns 0 (success) exit code when no packages found

[era eriksson]

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.6.11-1+b1
X-Debbugs-Cc: era+debian at iki.fi

I bumped into another case where a zero (success) exit code was produced
when the requested action could not be taken.  I'm submitting this as a
separate bug report even though it has similarities with e.g. #590686
and #592818 and should hopefully be possible to fix with similar means.

The scenario has to do with installing i386 packages on an x86_64
system. I can successfully "dpkg --add-architecture i386" but the
partial mirror in the test network we have at work doesn't carry any
i386 packages, so they cannot be installed.

dpkg --add-architecture i386 && aptitude update && aptitude install -y
libc6:i386 || echo failed

appears to succeed in this scenario; whereas with apt-get instead of
aptitude, I get the desired and expected behavior.

The output from aptitude is:

jessie$ sudo aptitude install -y libc6:i386
Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "libc6:i386"
Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "libc6:i386"
No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.

jessie$ echo $?
0

Note that this also masks the error when you did dpkg --add-architecture
but forgot to do apt-get update to download new package indices for the
architecture you added. (Also notice the unattractive but harmless
duplicated message.)

/* era */

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