Bug#657560: #657560: apt: ...i18n_Translation-en Encountered a section with no Package: header
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
>
> Only a few mirrors seem to be configured to act this way, at least
> de, de2 and us are not effected as far as i have tested. (which is
> why i was never hit by that bug after implementing the request for
> uncompressed files to support users with local mirrors which actually
> have these files available)
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.
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.
IMO, bumping bzip2 to Recommends isn't any kind of an over-reaction.
without bzip2, the functionality of apt (and others) is impaired.
BTW, the content negotiation configuration must be a lot more common
than you think - i've tried three mirrors, and they all behaved the
same. one was the aarnet.edu.au mirror, and the other two were my
own mirrors at work and at home. The latter two at least I know are
standard debian apache2 default installs (negotiation module enabled by
default, and without any content-neg customisations)
$ cat /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/negotiation.conf
<IfModule mod_negotiation.c>
#
# LanguagePriority allows you to give precedence to some languages
# in case of a tie during content negotiation.
#
# Just list the languages in decreasing order of preference. We have
# more or less alphabetized them here. You probably want to change this.
#
LanguagePriority en ca cs da de el eo es et fr he hr it ja ko ltz nl nn no pl pt pt-BR ru sv tr zh-CN zh-TW
#
# ForceLanguagePriority allows you to serve a result page rather than
# MULTIPLE CHOICES (Prefer) [in case of a tie] or NOT ACCEPTABLE (Fallback)
# [in case no accepted languages matched the available variants]
#
ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback
</IfModule>
craig
--
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
BOFH excuse #242:
Software uses US measurements, but the OS is in metric...
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