Re: failed to fetch Sid InRelease

[Haines Brown <haines@histomat.net>]

Cindy-Sue, your caution appreciated, but I too am in the habit of
deleting lock files. But in this case, it did not help. I also
adventurously gave the partial directory 755 permissions rather than
700, but still no go.

In my ignorance, what strikes me as a problem is that there is no "_apt"
in /etc/group. Googling suggests that _apt should be a named user, but
can get wiped out. In discussion of

  Bug#806406: 1.1 regression: apt-get hangs forever, due to missing
  "_apt" user  

  Bug#812251: apt: suddenly segfaults after "apt update"

I get impression that _apt, the owner of /var/lib/apt/partial/ is a
dynamic system user. Using a static user like sys or daemon is not a
good idea. It seems that something that copies /etc/passwd can clobber
_apt. Do dynamic system users appear in /etc/group?

I do

  # cat /etc/passwd | grep apt
  _apt:x:116:65534::/nonexistent:/bin/false

I get the impression this is normal, but shouldn't _apt be in /etc/group
file as user? When debian packages are built for experimental, it seems
this is needed:

  # adduser --force-badname --system -home /var/empty --no-create-home \
  --quiet _apt

wouldn't this put _apt into /etc/group? I'm really nervous about issuing
this command without any idea of what I'm doing.

Haines