[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#529925: Bug#529925: stupidly retried to install nonexistent package

[Russ Allbery]

martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> writes:

> Every half hour, I see
>
>   (//Node[debiannode]/base/Package[vim-nox]/ensure) ensure changed 'purged' to 'present'
>
> from puppet on one of my hosts. No other warning (/var/log/puppet is
> empty!?!??), so it took me a while to notice and then figure out what
> was going on.
>
> The problem is that vim-nox does not exist on etch yet:
>
>   E: Package vim-nox has no installation candidate
>
> It would be nice if puppet could emit a proper warning when apt-get
> failed in this way.

I've asked Luke about this before, and I seem to recall that it was
traced down to aptitude or apt-get not having a sane exit status so
Puppet couldn't tell easily whether it had failed or not.  And indeed
that appears to be the case for aptitude:

windlord:/root# aptitude install asdfafgbvadst
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information      
Initializing package states... Done
Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "asdfafgbvadst"
Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "asdfafgbvadst"
No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information       
Initializing package states... Done

windlord:/root# echo $?
0

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>