Re: debugging apt-get

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

On Wed 12 Oct 2022 at 16:42:10 (-0700), Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 October 2022 at 01:10:06 UTC-4, tomas wrote:
> 
> > Try doing "apt-cache policy Y", that might shed light on this.
> 
> This reports
> ```
> Y:
>  Installed: (none)
>  Candidate: 1.0.3
>  Version table:
>     1.0.3 500
>        500 <repo> focal/main amd64 Packages
>     1.0.1 500
>        500 <repo> focal/main amd64 Packages
> ```
> 
> > > (I'm running on Ubuntu 20.04, using apt-get=2.0.6)
> > (Isn't there a Ubuntu mailing list, btw? They might be doing funny stuff 
> > with their packaging which perhaps change the problem space) 
> 
> The repo is actually our own in-house repo (managed via artifactory).
> Are there any clear semantic rules spelled out in some document that govern what should happen ? I'm surprised that if my package "X" has specific and unambiguous dependencies on an existing package "Y", and that version exists in the repo, it should be installed. Am I missing something ?
> 
> Is this an `apt-get` bug ? Is there any way to debug this further ?
> (For a specific case I can work around the issue by injecting an explicit `apt-get install` command, but this is of course not a scalable solution for the general case.)

Can we check your package's control file, by your typing:

$ ar --output=/tmp/ -x your-X-package.deb control.tar.xz ; zcat /tmp/control.tar.xz

to see what X instructs apt to do.

Cheers,
David.