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Re: set-selections warnings



On 09/23/2012 11:11 AM, The Wanderer wrote:
Has the procedure for working with 'dpkg --set-selections' changed at some
point?


Yes & No.  check with 'listbugs dpkg' when in doubt.

wtopa@dj:~$ bugs dpkg
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
serious bugs of dpkg (-> ) <marked as done in some version>
#679641 - dpkg: if mcstransd is unexpectedly stopped then dpkg uses invalid SE Linux context (Fixed: dpkg/1.16.6 dpkg/1.15.8.13)
serious bugs of dpkg (-> ) <unfixed>
#684776 - dpkg incorrectly complains about conffile contents being different for MA packages
Summary:
 dpkg(2 bugs)

This is what I got at 11:55 EST


According to the dpkg man page, the sequence

dpkg --get-selections > selection_list
[copy selection_list to a remote machine]
dpkg --clear-selections
dpkg --set-selections < selection_list

should result in the second machine having the exact same set of package
selections as the first one. I seem to recall that I did this once in
the past,
and it worked as expected.

Currently (wheezy with bits of sid), however, when I try this I get a
flood of
messages of the form

dpkg: warning: package not in database at line X: packagename

and the warned-about packages do not get selected for installation (as
reported
by a subsequent 'dpkg --get-selections' on the second machine).

Specifically, I get one such message for every package which was *not*
already
in the list which would have been printed by 'dpkg --get-selections' on the
second machine. I suspect that this is also the same as the list of
packages
from /var/lib/dpkg/available.

(The '--clear-selections' step is not necessary to reproduce the problem. I
included it on the basis of the recommendation in the man page, on the off
chance that it would fix something.)


It appears that 'dpkg --set-selections' will not set the status of a
package
which it doesn't know about. That wouldn't necessarily be unreasonable,
except
that the packages it knows about seem to be limited to only packages
which are
(or have been) installed on the current system.

As a result, the example given in the dpkg man page for using
'--set-selections'
doesn't seem to work.

Is there something I'm missing which would let this work? Or should I
file a bug
against dpkg, to either get this working again, or at least get the man
page
fixed to match reality?



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