Bug#657560: #657560: apt: ...i18n_Translation-en Encountered a section with no Package: header
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 08:51, Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 12:15:38PM +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote:
>> No, i am saying that apt asks for Translation-en and the
>> server response with Translation-en.bz2. APT knows that
>> it can't request the bz2 file if bzip2 isn't available,
>> but some mirrors try to be helpful and clever… See also
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation
>
> good explanation, thanks.
>
> but even given the content negotiation issue, apt-get somehow recognises
> that the Translation-en file is actually bzipped and tries to decompress
> it. if bzip2 is installed, it succeeds. if not, it fails.
If bzip2 is installed APT will request Translation-en.bz2 before asking for
the uncompressed Translation-en. There is no magic recognizing which type
a file we requested has because magic usually fails and we know it anyway
based on the filename we have requested.
(So, in essence we do client side content negotiation based on the Release
file and do not expect the server to try content negotiation on his side)
> Also, without bzip2 installed, neither aptitude nor apt-cache or other
> tools will have full descriptions available. So users can't find out
> the details on a package before they install it, and 'apt-cache search'
> can't search on the non-existant full-text description.
That is right, but that's not a change as this was the case for Translation-*
since ever. It's just now that LongDescriptions are shipped in Translation-en,
but i couldn't search in my local before that either.
> IMO, bumping bzip2 to Recommends isn't any kind of an over-reaction.
> without bzip2, the functionality of apt (and others) is impaired.
We could recommend it, but that doesn't help much as bzip2 is only
"optional", so it wouldn't be included on cd/chroot.
I guess we will need to implement libbz2 support in some way.
dpkg (pre-)depends on that so it wouldn't be a new requirement
for the base system.
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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