On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 11:34:21 -0700, Freddy Freeloader wrote:
Florian Kulzer wrote:
On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 08:08:22 -0700, Freddy Freeloader wrote:
I have three separate machines that have identical entries in
/etc/apt/sources.list. All were updated and upgraded this morning as a
result of troubleshooting this issue. On machine #1 I can apt-cache show
nhfsstone and it returns the expected data on nhfsstone. On machines 2
and 3 it tells me that the nhfsstone package cannot be found. Running
apt-cache search nfs on all machines yeilds similar results. Machine #1
has nhfsstone included in the result set. Machines 2 and 3 do not. All
machines are pointed to: deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian sid main
contrib non-free. This just makes absolutely no sense to me. I'm
pointing all three to the same set of repositories and yet two machines
cannot find a software package the other machine finds. I realize that
all machines may not see exactly the same server every time, but to have
a package being found on one machine and missing on two others seems very
strange.
Can anyone explain this anomaly this to me?
It seems to me that nhfsstone is no longer in Sid.
My guess is that machine #1 has it only as a local package. What is the
output of "apt-cache policy nhfsstone" on this machine?
Thanks Florian,
It is reported as installed, which it is. However, since it was installed
and the present time I have run "apt-get clean" so the package no longer
exists in the local apt archives.
But it is still listed by apt-cache as "100 /var/lib/dpkg/status" for
the currently installed version, right?
Does this mean that apt-cache reads the local database + the server
repositories rather than the just the server repositories? I tend to see
that as a bug, not a feature, as it leads people, such as me, to believe a
package which was installed at some time in the past on the local machine
still exists in the repositories when it has, in fact, been removed.
I think many people would not like it if apt-cache no longer found the
local packages, custom kernels, etc. If a package is still installed
then its information is included in apt's package cache, and "apt-cache"
bases all its results on this cache. It does not query the repositories
at all but it gets this information indirectly whenever you run "apt-get
update" (or aptitude, etc.).
If you want to run queries on what is available in the repositories you
will probably have to use "apt-file" or "rmadison" (from package
"devscripts").