[Aptitude-devel] Bug#799934: aptitude: Package metadata disappears for upgradable installed packages

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo

Hi,

2015-09-24 14:14 Guillem Jover:
>Package: aptitude
>Version: 0.7.2-1
>Severity: normal
>
>Hi!
>
>I'm not sure since when, probably since last aptitude update, but I'm
>seeing that some of the metadata disappears in the TUI whenever there
>is an upgrade for a package on the *first* aptitude TUI invocation just
>after an «apt update». When going inside the package view, like this:
>[...]
>Notice at least the missing Homepage field, the empty Maintainer field,
>and the wrong Source Package field. After exiting from aptitude, and
>entering again, the metadata is there again. I've not noticed this
>on the command-line with «aptitude show libatk1.0-dev=2.18.0-1», but
>perhaps that's because it only happens on first usage.

All of them come from apt's pkgRecords::Parser, after
Lookup(ver.FileList()), and in all cases this happens because of empty
strings.

The reason that the problem is manifested in this curious way is
because:

- Homepage is tested for emptiness, and if empty no field is shown

- Maintainer is simply empty

- Source is also tested for emptiness, and due to the convention that
  packages with same Binary and Source name is the record can omit
  Source field in the record, aptitude thinks that it's one of these
  cases and assumes that the source package name is the same as the
  binary package name.

In other words, is doing the sensible thing given that the information
that receives is empty.

Now, why is it empty?  I made a change to the source version to adapt it
to apt-1.1, but it should work in 1.1.

Speaking of which, is this with apt 1.1 or the current versions in
unstable/testing/stable?  You didn't submit with reportbug so this info
is not available.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>