[Aptitude-devel] Bug#721426: aptitude: packages are sometimes selected for upgrade by default just after aptitude is started

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2016-03-09 14:14:03 +0000, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
[...]
> What's the difference between them?  "Upgrade: yes" is the same in
> pkgstates.old and pkgstates, respectively.
> 
> (If you mean the "remove reason" might be correct or a small
> incorrection but probably without any practical consequence for this
> case).

I was first wondering why "Upgrade: yes", and initially thought
that it could be due to the remove reason. Then, I wanted to show
that this didn't matter. This was before seeing the issue with
the timestamps.

> Did you by some chance do that, or are aware that aptitude crashed after
> running dpkg?

I'm quite sure that it didn't. Otherwise I would have noticed and
reported a bug.

But I notice the same issue on a different machine, where last in
/var/log/aptitude, I get:

Aptitude 0.7.8: log report
Mon, Mar  7 2016 14:22:40 +0100

but:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9490347 2016-03-07 14:04:58 pkgstates
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9489801 2016-03-07 14:03:27 pkgstates.old

with lots of "Upgrade: yes" in pkgstates (all these packages
are at their latest version, so that the bug is not visible
when running aptitude).

On a third machine:

Aptitude 0.7.8: log report
Wed, Mar  9 2016 10:24:39 +0100

and

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6060711 2016-03-09 10:29:51 pkgstates
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6060711 2016-03-09 10:29:48 pkgstates.old

So, here this seems OK.

I don't know whether this is always like that. The 3 machines
have similar configurations. I think that the main difference
is that on the first two, /var/lib/dpkg/arch contains

amd64
i386

and on the third one, /var/lib/dpkg/arch doesn't exist.

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Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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