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

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo


2012-09-15 04:19 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.


APT deities said that this option is only useful for debugging
internally (for example to force apt to operate even with bad caches)
and seldom used even by the development team.  It is not documented in
man pages or anywhere visible.


So in principle the bug report can be closed without further action.

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