Ubuntu 16.04 - issue with bsdtar package installation

[Tomas Lipensky]

apt install bsdtar fails with dependency issue on 16.04:

root@czz17163-laptop:~/scripts# apt-get install bsdtar
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 bsdtar : Depends: libarchive13 (= 3.1.2-11build1) but 3.1.2-11ubuntu0.16.04.3 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Solution:

Include in repository the bsdtar package from https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/amd64/bsdtar/download
(wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/liba/libarchive/bsdtar_3.1.2-11ubuntu0.16.04.3_amd64.deb )
which works with libarchive13 in version 3.1.2-11ubuntu0.16.04.3 which is included in U16.04

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for taking your time to report this issue and help making Ubuntu better.

Looking at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libarchive it seems that 3.1.2-11build1 was the original version available, but that 3.1.2-11ubuntu0.16.04.3 has been pushed as an update. It might be that the package you attempt to install is still pointing to the older version. This can occur if you have just recently installed your system or a package mirror is temporarily out of sync. Could you please try running `sudo apt update` to update the package lists and see if the issue persists?

[Tomas Lipensky (tlip)]

Thank you for your reply. In fact this is what I'm failing to. Only manual installation helps. Maybe apt cannot distinguish what is higher version or it is not in repo. I redo the excercises once again:

apt update
Hit:1 http://repo.steampowered.com/steam precise InRelease
Ign:2 http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty InRelease
Hit:3 http://ppa.launchpad.net/3v1n0/libfprint-vfs0090/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:5 http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty Release
Ign:6 http://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable InRelease
Hit:7 http://ppa.launchpad.net/alessandro-strada/ppa/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:8 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security InRelease
Get:9 http://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable Release [3 829 B]
Hit:10 http://linux.teamviewer.com/deb stable InRelease
Hit:11 http://linux.teamviewer.com/deb preview InRelease
Get:12 http://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable Release.gpg [819 B]
Hit:13 https://repo.skype.com/deb stable InRelease
Hit:14 http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonathonf/firefox-esr/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:15 https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/16.04/prod xenial InRelease
Hit:16 http://ppa.launchpad.net/libreoffice/libreoffice-5-4/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:18 http://ppa.launchpad.net/samoilov-lex/aftl-stable/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:19 http://ocdc.hursley.ibm.com/ocdc xenial-safe InRelease
Get:20 http://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable/main amd64 Packages [1 372 B]
Get:21 http://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable/main i386 Packages [1 373 B]
Fetched 7 393 B in 1s (6 197 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
1 package can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see it.
W: http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-security/InRelease: Signature by key 630239CC130E1A7FD81A27B140976EAF437D05B5 uses weak digest algorithm (SHA1)

apt search bsdtar
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
bsdtar/now 3.1.2-11ubuntu0.16.04.3 amd64 [installed,local]
  Implementation of the 'tar' program from FreeBSD

node-tar/xenial,xenial,now 1.0.3-2 all [installed,automatic]
  read and write portable...

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for the `sudo apt update` output. You seem to be missing some of the xenial repos and that is likely causing these issues.

If you look again on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libarchive notice that there's three lines for packages in xenial. When 16.04 originally shipped, it included version 3.1.2-11build1 . Since then, version 3.1.2-11ubuntu0.16.04.3 has been released but this is pushed to the xenial-security repo. So on my machine it looks like this:
$ apt policy bsdtar
bsdtar:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 3.1.2-11ubuntu0.16.04.3
  Version table:
     3.2.1-2~ubuntu16.04.1 100
        100 http://no.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports/universe amd64 Packages
        100 http://no.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports/universe i386 Packages
     3.1.2-11ubuntu0.16.04.3 500
        500 http://no.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/universe amd64 Packages
     3.1.2-11build1 500
        500 http://no.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages

Because I have multiple ones available. In fact, the package you manually downloaded came from the xenial-security repo, but you should have this available.

What I would do is run `software-properties-gtk`, go to the Updates tab and make sure you have selected both xenial-security and xenial-updates. Then the newer, updated version of bsdtar and dependencies should be available. (Once you do this, you probably also have a couple of hundred security upgrades lined up for install)

I am not sure why you don't have these repos enabled by default, but there's a couple of other strange this with your repo list. It also seems to include the Ubuntu archives for trusty and precise-security which are older releases and 16.04 will not expect or know how to mix these packages. (I'm a bit surprised this hasn't caused other problems yet) So you might want to consider removing those. (I'm not familiar with most of the third party repos, so I can't say much about those.)

The main thing is anyways to enable regular and security updates for xenial which should sort this out. :)

[Tomas Lipensky (tlip)]

Thank you very much Hans Joachim. I wasn't aware that I'm missing updates, because i was receiving some. Have a great weekend.