[Aptitude-devel] Bug#883242: Bug#883242: aptitude: lists packages from non-Debian origins as "The main Debian archive"

[Simon McVittie]

On Fri, 01 Dec 2017 at 12:35:39 +0100, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Simon McVittie wrote:
> >     --\ New Packages (1)
> >       --\ games          Games, toys, and fun programs (1)
> >         --\ main           The main Debian archive (1)
> >     p     steam-launcher                                <none>         1.0.0.54
> 
> The string "The main Debian archive" is a static description string
> for archives called "main"

I assume you mean archive areas (which is what Policy calls the conceptual
division between main, contrib and non-free) or components (which is what
apt calls the data layout that implements that conceptual division).

The component containing steam-launcher is called steam, and its Section
is games, so it can't be coming from an explicit mention of main.
Presumably aptitude is applying this pseudocode:

    if '/' in Section:
        archive-area, section = Section.split('/')
    else:
        archive-area = 'main'
        section = Section

Debian Policy §2.4 does talk about how the Section field should reflect
the archive area, but non-Debian archives aren't bound by Policy.
In practice, I think third-party .deb distributors like Valve and GOG
will probably choose an unadorned Section like 'games' more often than
they choose one that encodes an archive area like 'non-free/games',
even if arguably they should be using 'non-free/games' or 'steam/games'
or similar.

I can see that the information available to aptitude doesn't make this
at all easy, because it can know which apt origin an available package
comes from (it's in the Release file), but cannot in general know which
origin an already-installed package came from (all it knows is the dpkg
metadata, which doesn't include the origin); so it can't know whether
the absence of an archive area prefix in the Section means Debian main,
or Ubuntu main, or some third-party thing that isn't necessarily even
Free Software.

    smcv