#225882 - dselect: Some packages missing from list
Hi,
regarding:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=225882
This report brings up some interesting questions.
Does Debian support (as in willing to track down bugs resulting from)
the use of stable, testing, unstable, and experimental in one
sources.list file?
The packages mentioned were in the stable release of the day and not in
testing/unstable, but no one ever asked which other packages were
missing or how APT saw the situation (i.e., the output of "apt-cache
policy", "apt-cache dumpavail", or a diff of apt-cache's dump and
dumpavail commands)... it is practically (maybe even actually)
impossible today to get the "moreinfo" needed to better understand what
was happenning. Is it appropriate to close an old bug which with
hindsight should have been tagged "moreinfo" when that info is unlikely
to be available today?
[I have closed ancient bugs (6-8yrs old) for that reason, but this one
hasn't even seen its 3rd birthday yet and the packages are still in
oldstable]
The easiest thing to do is simply reassign the bug since the update
method most likely used is part of the APT package, although that was
never explicitly confirmed and a different update method may well have
resulted in what was seen. Is it appropriate to punt a bug off to
another package: based on a reasonable assumption? after almost three
years? when it is unlikely the other package's maintainers will be able
to sort things out?
Personally, I would answer those five questions: no, yes, maybe, no, yes
(but it is not a nice thing to do)... and be -done with it because the
most likely cause was APT's policy during a "dumpavail" resulting in
the missing packages being left out of the available file passed onto
dselect---so, either not really a bug or a weird side effect of having
all available archives in the sources.list file.
- Bruce
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