[pkg-go] Bug#801594: ratt uses /var/lib/apt/lists/ directly and depends on unstable being part of the local apt sources.list

[Johannes Schauer]

Package: ratt
Version: 0.0~git20150816.0.b060319-1
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

ratt currently directly uses files from /var/lib/apt/lists/ but this
should not be done for reasons explained in bug #752702. Important
quotes by David Kalnischkies:

| I think it is a bad idea to use our lib-directory directly. A lot of
| strange stuff happens in there, from InRelease to Release renames as
| Julian mentioned, over gzip compressed indexes (Acquire::GzipIndexes) to
| files which are not authenticated. Sometimes even unused stuff is still
| there (List-Cleanup disabled – aptitude did it for a while if I remember
| correctly, if it isn't still doing it).  I probably forgot the other
| more obscure half and nobody knows what the future will bring aka: This
| is a really horrible "interface" to work with so much that I would agrue
| that every user is a bug (but I guess this is mostly a "we have no other
| choice at the moment" bug…).
|
| [...]
|
| I think it is incorrect to use /var/lib/apt/lists directly as you can
| never be sure what is in there.  If you get the filename from the API
| on i the other hand, that is "okay".  i i Compare it to "cat
| /var/lib/dpkg/info/apt.preinst" vs "dpkg-query i --control-show apt
| preinst" to get the content of preinst script.

Instead, with apt (>= 1.1~exp9) you can use:

$ apt-get files "Codename: sid"

(this is also explained in bug #752702).

Alternatively, you can also use chdist. Using chdist is probably even
the better solution as otherwise the system where ratt is used always
has to have unstable in their apt sources.

Thanks!

cheers, josch