apt's display of repositories with directories is incomplete

[Christian Reis]

My sources.list has this:

  deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~daf/packages ./

When I issue an apt-get update, I get this:

  Hit http://people.ubuntu.com ./ Release
  Ign http://people.ubuntu.com ./ Release
  Ign http://people.ubuntu.com ./ Packages
  Hit http://people.ubuntu.com ./ Packages

Where's the ~daf/packages?

I thought it was an issue with the tilde (~) perhaps, but when I have:

  deb http://bazaar.canonical.com/packages/debs/ ./

I still get:

  Hit http://bazaar.canonical.com ./ Release
  Ign http://bazaar.canonical.com ./ Release
  Ign http://bazaar.canonical.com ./ Packages
  Ign http://bazaar.canonical.com ./ Sources
  Hit http://bazaar.canonical.com ./ Packages
  Hit http://bazaar.canonical.com ./ Sources

Additionally, if I have something like:

  deb file:///mondo/packages/ubuntu/warty ./

I get the very confusing

  Ign file: ./ Release.gpg
  Ign file: ./ Release

  Ign file: ./ Packages

This is pretty bad for people.ubuntu.com, in particular, because it's not really
possible to distinguish between the different repositories. Is this hard to fix?

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This is a feature of apt. It tries to to shorten the uri so that it better
readable on a terminal.

I played a bit with the code and if the full URI is used, the output looks
pretty bad:

root@top ~/devel/apt/apt--mvo/build/bin # ./apt-get update
Get:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/Release.gpg [189B]
Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/Release.gpg [189B]
Hit http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/Release
Hit http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/GCC-4.0/i386/Packages.gz
Hit http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/main/source/Sources.bz2
Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/main/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
Hit http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/restricted/source/Sources.bz2
Hit http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/universe/source/Sources.bz2
Hit
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/restricted/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/universe/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
Hit
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/breezy/multiverse/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
Fetched 2B in 0s (3B/s)
Reading package lists... Done

Cheers,
 Michael

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

I don't know what to say, but check out this message:

  W: Couldn't stat source package list http://people.ubuntu.com ./ Packages
(/var/lib/apt/lists/people.ubuntu.com_%7emvo_apt_apt-cache-control_._Packages) -
stat (2 No such file or directory)
  W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

This is particularly bad on my system, which has about 5 people.ubuntu.com
entries -- it's unobvious which is to blame until I look at %7evmo.

I don't think the actual filenames are very useful, but the full directory used
in the apt sources list should be preserved, as it's the only way I can track
probles back to their source. So for the example I posted, I'd expect:

   deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~daf/packages ./

to generate

  Hit http://people.ubuntu.com/~daf/packages ./ Release
  [...]

and

  deb http://bazaar.canonical.com/packages/debs/ ./

to get me

  Hit http://bazaar.canonical.com/packages/debs ./ Release

In these specific cases the lines would not be longer than 70 chars, and I think
that may hold true for most repositories.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I agree that this output needs to be improved. I see various options:

1. we show the full path to the archive:
Get:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ breezy Release.gpg [189B]
Ign http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/GCC-4.0/i386/ Release.gpg
Hit http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ breezy Release
Get:2 http://ring.fujixerox.co.jp/archives/linux/debian/debian-ddtp/ sarge
Release.gpg [197B]
[..]

2. Only show the first component of the path:
Get:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy Release.gpg [189B]
Ign http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko Release.gpg
Hit http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy Release
Get:2 http://ring.fujixerox.co.jp/archives sarge Release.gpg [197B]
[..]

Or use a mixture of the two (show full path if it is not too long etc). If we
use 1) the pathes may become very long. That's why I lean toward going with
solution 2). It's not hard to fix,

For the error, there should always be a the full path displayed, I'll attach a
patch for that.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Created an attachment (id=2427)
describe a indexfile more verbose (used to report errors better)

deb{Sources,Package}Index::Info() is only used by
deb{Sources,Package}Index::Describe(). This functin is used to display errors
about the IndexFile to the user and to display the cache policy in apt-cache.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Long time no see, but option 2 looks good to me. Why don't you try that post-hardy?

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Undoing invalidation done by a halfwit.

[Nigel Babu (nigelbabu)]

Mvo, thanks for the patch. Do you have plans for this patch? I checked it out and it doesn't apply anymore.