apt update decides to abort on its own

[Christian Ehrhardt ]

Hi,
I saw this by accident and I'm not sure if it is a bug or if it just was a bad config.
But I wanted to report to be sure this isn't missed.

I happened to do an apt upgrade like this:

$ sudo apt upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  irqbalance libcaca-dev libcaca0 libmysqlclient20 libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon libvirt-daemon-driver-storage-rbd libvirt-daemon-system libvirt0 psmisc qemu qemu-block-extra qemu-kvm qemu-system qemu-system-arm qemu-system-common qemu-system-data qemu-system-gui
  qemu-system-mips qemu-system-misc qemu-system-ppc qemu-system-s390x qemu-system-sparc qemu-system-x86 qemu-user-static qemu-utils snapd ubuntu-core-launcher ubuntu-snappy ubuntu-snappy-cli
30 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 82,8 MB of archives.
After this operation, 6.298 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Abort.

The "bug" now is that thie "Abort" at the end was not my decision.
It directly went to that.
dist-upgrade did the same.

I was puzzled at first, did an `apt update` to be sure but the problem continued to trigger.

One thing that I found was that on update I saw a message like this:
E: The repository 'http://ppa.launchpad.net/ci-train-ppa-service/3520/ubuntu cosmic Release' no longer has a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

That is correct this PPA was deleted a while ago, but that should not kill the upgrade right?
I removed the files, updated and now things are working fine:
  $ sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ci-train-ppa-service-ubuntu-3520-cosmic.list*
  $ sudo apt update
   [...]
  $ sudo apt upgrade (now working)

This might be an intentional protection against "lost repos" but then there should be a better message?

I'll file it as low prio, let me know what you think.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Did you switch terminals in between or reset it?

Those should not be related, it sounds more like a terminal screwup. Like, sometimes, at least in gnome-terminal, it reaches a point where readline and friends fail for some reason.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

> Did you switch terminals in between or reset it?

No it was all in the same terminal - not even a re-login via ssh

> Those should not be related, it sounds more like a terminal screwup.
> Like, sometimes, at least in gnome-terminal, it reaches a point where
> readline and friends fail for some reason.

I found nothing in /var/crash (the system was set up to collect them).

So for now it seems we have no good lead.

Please let me know what you would need in case I can trigger it again.
Then until I find something mark it incomplete.