[Aptitude-devel] Bug#1032654: Bug#1032654: aptitude: missing message about the Debian bookworm change concerning non-free-firmware

[Axel Beckert]

Control: clone -1 -2
Control: retitle -2 aptitude: "aptitude -u" does not show download warnings emitted by "aptitude update" after the successful download of package lists.
Control: clone -1 -3
Control: retitle -3 aptitude: "aptitude update" does not show all NOTICE level messages if apt would change the default messages threshold to NOTICE
Control: severity -3 minor
Control: submitter -3 !
Control: clone -1 -4
Control: retitle -4 aptitude: apt's message threshold level should be configurable in aptitude (especially for the TUI), maybe via --log-level?
Control: severity -4 wishlist
Control: submitter -4 !
Control: severity -1 minor
Control: tag -1 + wontfix

Hi Vincent,

thanks for making us aware of the subtle difference between apt and
aptitude with regards to warnings and notices.

> This message should have been displayed by aptitude.

Did you test "aptitude update" or "aptitude -u" or both? It's not
clear from your bug report so far. (They behave differently in this
hindsight as I found out while digging into this topic, see below.)

> Without it, the user who uses aptitude only may never be aware of
> this change […]

This is wrong. Without doubt this type of information will be part of
the release notes — which is usually the _primary_ source for these
type of changes. I'm actually surprised that apt added such a message.

Besides that, the apt developers decided to output this only as LOW
severity message on the "notice" level (prefix by "N:" and in normal
font face; AFAIK the lowest level).

Aptitude shows "error" messages from apt to the user, but only those
at the "WARNING" level or above (or at least only from somewhere above
the "NOTICE" level). It is currently unclear to me if this is
historically grown as apt (not aptitude) defines the _default_ message
threshold by apt in /usr/include/apt-pkg/error.h as "WARNING" in at
least three places. I at least currently assume that this is what
aptitude uses when it calls DumpErrors. According the apt's changelog,
"WARNING" was for quite some time also the lowest possible message
level. ("NOTICE" and "DEBUG" levels got added in 0.7.26~exp8.)

I also do see some sense to suppress some less important messages in
aptitude: All those messages would cause popup window in the TUI mode
which the user has to acknowledge (aka "to click away"). That can get
very annoying if there are too many low severity messages. So IMHO
it's not so bad that aptitude only shows more important messages.
Besides, it's the default threshold from apt.

Then again, "aptitude -u" does not show any of the warnings (or
notices) I currently get with "aptitude update", so "aptitude -u" only
seems to cause popups of warnings which are caused directly during the
download and not after a successful download. Cloning this as a
separate bug report.

Anyway, back to the original topic. So I edited
/usr/include/apt-pkg/error.h temporarily and replaced all but the
first occurence (which is the definition) of WARNING with NOTICE and
then compiled aptitude against it. aptitude update indeed
showed notices now. But to my surprise not all of them, just this one:

  N: Skipping acquire of configured file 'main/binary-i386/Packages' as repository 'file:/var/cache/apt-build/repository apt-build InRelease' doesn't support architecture 'i386'

Not yet sure if this is a bug in the way how the missing notices are
generated in apt or if it is a bug in aptitude not coping with the
changed default message threshold. Likely needs deeper investigation
(or better overview of the code), probably by Manuel. (I already put
hours in investigating this IMHO rather minor issue, just to
understand a bit how the innards of messages inside apt and aptitude
are working.) Filing as yet another separate bug report against
aptitude (for now at least), but with severity minor, as it currently
does only show up after a hypothetical modification in apt.

I'm also surprised that, despite the default threshold in
/usr/include/apt-pkg/error.h is WARNING, both, "apt update" and
"apt-get update" show notices. So the apt developers changed the
thresholds for both CLI frontends individually? Weird.

And JFTR: "aptitude update" does show the WARNING level messages from
apt about "Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring
(/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for
details." which apt also shows in a bold font face compared to
seemingly not important messages like these about the
non-free-firmware repo. (Not "aptitude -u", though.)

Admittedly the message level threshold of aptitude should be user
configurable so that every user/admin can adjust their own TUI popup
annoyance level.

Actually I would have expected to see those notices on
--log-level=info, but I didn't and from the code it also seems that
this option has no influence on how aptitude uses apt's DumpErrors().

Anyway, despite I uncovered some more severe issues while trying to
understand how apt's and aptitude's message handling works internally,
I strongly disagree about the severity of the initial bug report (at
least those parts which were clear enough) and agree with the apt
developers that the message about the Debian bookworm change
concerning non-free-firmware is only a notice, not a warning.

And I don't expect that Manuel (and surely not me myself) will change
something in the way aptitude handles messages from apt for bookworm
as it likely will be way more invasive than is good at this stage of
the freeze. Hence tagging it as wontfix, too.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5
  `-    |  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE