18.04 LTS LiveCD ships with unmet dependency breaking apt state

[dundir]

The latest release of the 18.04 LTS livecd downloaded a few days ago appears to have been shipped with unmet dependencies that leave the package manager apt in a broken state. The end result being apt blocks further package installation (i.e. in my case bcache-tools). After searching this issue doesn't appear to have been reported yet.

The package, bsd-mailx, has an unmet dependency for default-mta or mail-transport-agent which apt resolves to postfix.

Postfix is not installed by default within the live environment and the normal procedure of using apt-get --fix-missing install does not complete due to a problem during installation with the postfix debian package.

Removal of the bsd-mailx package is necessary to resume normal package manager operations, and its unclear whether the removal breaks other expected (or required) functionality of the 18.04 LTS OS.

I'd also like to add the error output for apt could be greatly improved for both readability and troubleshooting complexity if the output between --fixmissing and apt install exceptions were consistent.

The --fix-missing output does not correctly reference the package with the unmet dependency. In this particular case the output reference refers to postfix which was a package name resolution by apt from default-mta or mail-transport-agent.

The result being several, potentially unnecessary, extra steps during troubleshooting and identification of the package causing the issue.

Description: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS
Release: 18.04
Removing bsd-mailx (8.1.2-0.20160123cvs-4)

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1809516/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

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[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Could you please provide some steps to reproduce the bug you encountered so I can try an recreate this? e.g. sudo apt-get --fix-missing ...

Thanks!

[dundir (dundir)]

Thanks for responding. As of today, I've been unable to replicate the issue.

The issue had been persistent (surviving three consecutive reboots into the live environment) the day of the report.

The details are a bit fuzzy now, iirc, apt update would fail due to using ipv6 instead of ipv4, I'd work around it forcing ipv4 using -o Acquire::ForceIPv4=true to update the catalog and then go about installing the packages I needed, it would error out as described above, troubleshooting moved forward, tracked it back to the bsdmailx package and removed it which allowed me to move forward.

It seems to be working fine now, and I'm not having the issues with apt incorrectly using ipv4 v ipv6 now either (strange).

[dundir (dundir)]

I should add that apt update is the first thing I do when booting into a livecd. In my initial report, I'd assumed a simple packaging issue. The issue now appears to be more complex.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for bsd-mailx (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]