aptitude pkgstates gets corrupted
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
aptitude (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: aptitude
On four different machines (one 32 bit, two 64bit), I am recently experiencing corruptions in the package status database private to aptitude, namely /var/lib/
This results in a crazy behavior of aptitude, that starts thinking that many packages are broken when in fact they are not. For instance.
aptitude install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
The following packages are BROKEN:
apturl gnome-app-install libgpod4 libgpod4-nogtk mysql-server-
The following NEW packages will be installed:
acl binutils-static emacs22 emacs22-bin-common emacs22-common firefox-
gfortran-4.3 gij gnome-mount imagemagick-doc klogd libavutil-
libboost-
libggi-target-x libggi2 libgii1 libgii1-target-x libgmyth0 liblrdf0 libpolkit-gnome0
libpvm3 libsmbios2 libsoprano-dev libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0 mysql-server-
nvidia-
python-gst0.10 python-
ttf-bengali-fonts ttf-kannada-fonts ttf-oriya-fonts ttf-telugu-fonts update-motd wine
wine-gecko
This is very very dangerous, because, following up with its crazy diagnosis, aptitude starts suggesting actions that can completely break a system.
And the crazyness of aptitude can be very easily seen by considering that for apt-get, synaptic and all the other front-ends to dpkg everything is just fine.
Interestingly, aptitude starts reporting as broken either packages that are installed and packages that are not installed. If one tries an
aptitude remove <package that is not installed but is reported as broken>
then aptitude does nothing, but the behavior of aptitude after this sanifies a bit.
removing /var/lib/
In the "wrong" pkgstates, it looks like many entries are just weird. For instance, installed packages are indicated as unseen, and after pkgstates is removed and re-generated, for many packages the state is then different.
I tend to think that bug reports 477468 and 39497 are in fact caused by this very problem, so I suggest marking those as duplicate of this one.
ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Jan 6 12:47:37 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelMo
Package: aptitude 0.4.11.11-1ubuntu6
ProcVersionSign
SourcePackage: aptitude
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-16-generic x86_64
Changed in aptitude (Ubuntu): | |
status: | New → Invalid |
... the beginning should have been "on four different machines (one 32bit, *three* 64bit).
I was forgetting to say that all result from upgrades from jaunty. None is a fresh install.