Comment 9 for bug 646834

The question is not if its another application at fault - it a message from APT all front-ends see if the conditions are meet. The question is just if these conditions are likely to be hit: The answer to this is no as this message was already changed "recently" (2009) to include the errno and the string connected to this of the underlying method used. The message from APT is just "something wicked happened" which isn't the best, but somehow an old tradition for error messages in APT to be "wicked" than nobody could imagine a better message so far.

The message you really complain here is "No address associated with hostname" which doesn't come from APT (directly) but from the method getaddrinfo() from (e)(g)libc. The most common error conditions (EAI_NONAME, EAI_SERVICE and EAI_AGAIN) from it are captured and a "better" message is provided, but for all other (most notable the one here: EAI_NODATA) APT doesn't try to provide one as so far nobody knows how to describe it in a way that someone could understand it without deeper knowledge of networks who happens to don't understand the message from getaddrinfo…

But if someone has a good one: Feel free to suggest it! Maybe, we should even change it in (e)(g)libc then…

P.S.: That the message was changed in 2009 was a result of a bug in eglibc triggered by a missing /etc/hostname, before and since then i have never seen it in real life and the bug obviously only existed in debian unstable…