aptitude does not tell that a package is already the newest

[ben]

it is not really a bug, but it is annoying.

<code> # aptitude install xpdf-utils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initialising package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
Writing extended state information... Done </code>

it tells me that it will NOTHING do:
<code>No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.</code>
that is okay, but i would like to know why it does not do anything. and i want to know it i have the newest available version.

<i>apt-get</i> told me, that the installed version is already the newest version. why can not <i>aptitude</i> do so?

[Matthew Woerly (nattgew)]

Ok, let's try this...
:~$ sudo apt-get install firefox
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
firefox is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

Looks cool. Oh, wait, he used aptitude, I might as well check that.
:~$ sudo aptitude install firefox
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  hplip-data
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
Writing extended state information... Done
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done

Wow. Definitely different. Not what you posted, but not fixed.
I'll check to see if there is some duplicate of this out there...

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Upstream bug merged with #421469 and fixed in aptitude 0.7.1-1
Checked ok Ubuntu 18.04 and aptitude 0.8.10
Closing by marking "Fix Released"