[Aptitude-devel] Bug#841506: aptitude: cannot reinstall package available as update

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi again,

2017-03-20 23:36 Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo:
>2017-03-07 23:33 GMT+01:00 Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk>:
>> Quoting Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo (2017-03-07 22:43:39)
>>>
>>> Under normal conditions, one can reinstall a single package ("l" +
>>> "g") at any time, no problem -- it doesn't prevent to Go ahead just
>>> because reinstall is not a supported operation.  Does this work for
>>> you right now, I hope?
>>
>> It works to reinstall packages, yes.  This bug is not that reinstall
>> stopped generally working, but that it refused to work for that specific
>> package being in limbo, where aptitude (or dpkg bubbling through?)
>> explicitly instructed to _reinstall_.
>> [...]
>>
>>> Nevermind.  This has to do with my wrong interpretation.  When the
>>> package to be reinstalled has been upgraded in the server, one should
>>> upgrade, reinstall never works.
>>
>> I realize that your misunderstanding me quite likely stems from my bad
>> phrasing of the subject of this bugreport: Kernel package had failed to
>> install _moments_ before trying to reinstall - not long time befor - so
>> situation was _not_ that the package no longer was available for
>> re-download (I am aware that "l" does a fresh download of the current
>> version of the package and therefore need that version to be available).
>
>Everything is more clear now, there are some ideas to simulate a
>broken update and try to reproduce it.
>
>However I'm quite low on spare time at the moment, so it can take a while.

For the record, I could not attempt to reproduce this item properly
(don't have space cycles to forge broken packages and check all code
paths), but I was working with other bugs related with reinstalling and
#851901 (incl. scheduling actions and reinstalling in later sessions)
and never observed similar behaviour as described in a previous message:

  "Choosing "L" to reinstall and then "G", is refused with (in danish,
  on my system) a message saying that no packages will be installed,
  removed or upgraded, some packages could be upgraded, and I should
  press "U" to do that."

So I am not sure what's going on, but I don't think that reinstalling is
missing from the logic related with 'G'.

Perhaps it's related with the package half-broken state in dpkg that
this could not proceed, or some temporary inconsistency between
aptitude<->apt or apt<->dpkg; but indeed it does not seem to be a
problem in the common case.


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