Fails to update packages in apport-retrace

[Michał Sawicz]

Since appstream landed on my machine, apport-retrace fails to update the sandbox apt caches with:

ERROR: E:Problem executing scripts APT::Update::Post-Invoke-Success 'if /usr/bin/test -e /usr/bin/appstreamcli; then appstreamcli refresh > /dev/null; fi', E:Sub-process returned an error code

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: apport-retrace 2.20-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-6.21-generic 4.4.1
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-6-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Fri Feb 19 11:08:18 2016
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: apport
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

This is resolved upstream in Git master - there will be a new release this weekend, which should make it into Ubuntu for Trusty.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This also affects running demotions.py in the ubuntu-release-upgrader source package.

 $ ./demotions.py wily xenial > demoted.cfg
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./demotions.py", line 90, in <module>
    cache.update(prog)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 454, in update
    raise FetchFailedException(e)
apt.cache.FetchFailedException: E:Problem executing scripts APT::Update::Post-Invoke-Success 'if /usr/bin/test -e /usr/bin/appstreamcli; then appstreamcli refresh > /dev/null; fi', E:Sub-process returned an error code

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I worked around this by commenting out the last 3 lines of /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50appstream.

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

If you have some time, can you check with the latest version from Git master and verify that the issue is resolved?
(code can be found here: https://github.com/ximion/appstream )
Unfortunately, the proper fix for this is scattered over a few patches, so it isn't as easy as applying a single patch.

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

I fixed this in Debian - you will want to sync `appstream >= 0.9.2-2` and `limba >= 0.5.6-1` (the latter is only needed to prevent this package from FTBFSing later with the new AppStream).
Cheers,
    Matthias