Re: [Aptitude-devel] aptitude ~A question

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Mon 14 Nov 2016 at 14:05:46 (+0100), steve wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> Coming back to this problem now that I have a bit more time.
> 
> As I have been making a lot of testing, this message is a bit long,
> sorry for that.
> 
> 
> >If you follow my recipe, any packages counted twice (as eg in both
> >the stable and jessie searches) will show up in the diff with a "-".
> 
> I have done this first for a = [trusty,jessie$,jessie-backports,stable]
> and then for a = now. No output for jessie$.
> 
> Then I have done this:
> 
> cat jessie-backports.txt trusty.txt stable.txt | sort | diff -u -now.txt > diff.txt
> 
> The first lines of diff.txt show
[snipped]
> Now, for example, we see that autopoint is present twice (once with a
> "-" and once with a blank space at the beginning of the line). So if I
> understand correctly, the package "autopoint" appears once in both the
> concatenation and in the total file and another time only in the
> concatenation. Can I see this behaviour using apt-cache?
> 
> apt-cache policy autopoint autopoint:
>  Installé : 0.19.3-2
>  Candidat : 0.19.3-2
> Table de version :
>     0.19.8.1-1~bpo8+1 0
>        100 http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ jessie-backports/main amd64 Packages
> *** 0.19.3-2 0
>        500 http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages
>        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
> 
> 
> So it seems that it's the jessie version which is installed. But
> 
> aptitude search ~Astable~i | grep autopoint
> i A autopoint
> 
> aptitude search ~Ajessie$~i | grep autopoint
> (no output)
> 
> aptitude search ~Ajessie-backports~i | grep autopoint
> i A autopoint
> 
> 
> which contradicts apt-cache! Is this a bug? Same behaviour for the
> package cmake-data.

I'm glad this method is shining a light on your problem. I'm afraid
that I'm not very experienced in running the many apt* commands
available, but others may help.

> (BTW, this package is taken from jessie but there is an existing
> backport package. Is is possible to upgrade to jessie-backports all
> jessie packages which have a jessie-backports version?)

One *might* try the brute force approach of just telling it to reinstall
everything on your system, but specifying -t jessie-backports as the
target, and -s of course to prevent anything happening while you checked.
But I don't know the answer.

Cheers,
David.