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Re: Handling of removed packages



On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 06:17:44PM +0200, Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl> was heard to say:
> James Vega wrote:
> > As of version 0.4.11, this does happen.  From the NEWS file:
> >   * Command-line updates in aptitude will now list packages that are
> >     newly obsolete.  This doesn't work when a source is removed and
> >     all its packages become obsolete, for technical reasons.
> 
> Hmm. New Debian release. User uses codenames in sources.list.
> 
> # sed -i "s/etch/lenny/" /etc/apt/sources.list
> # aptitude update
> 
> Does this fit in the exception listed above? I would think yes and in that 
> case the only use case we really care about would not be supported.
> Maybe I'm reading that wrong though or is "source" defined at a higher level 
> than I think it is.

  Here's what happens: aptitude update after editing sources.list will
initialize itself as usual, update the package lists, then re-read them
and looks for packages that weren't obsolete before.

  The problem is that in the initialization procedure, apt will only
read package lists that are mentioned in sources.list.  So as far as
aptitude knows, all the packages that are currently installed from etch
(in your example) were already obsolete before the lists are even
updated, and so they won't show up in the list of new obsolete packages.

  Daniel


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