Aptitude does not show reliably if a package is installed
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
aptitude (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
I have set up a new "oneiric" system (in a virtual machine) with architecture x86-64 from a minimal image ("net install"), installed some additional software, and installed all patches.
I have to mention that I did not select a predefined installation set (like "desktop", "server", "developer" etc.), but did the minimal install and then installed package by package what I needed, always using no other command than aptitude, and of course always following the recommends.
After some weeks, I was wondering why saslauthd had been installed; so I used apt-file to investigate. apt-file showed me that saslauthd belongs to package sasl2-bin. Therefore I was looking for all sasl packages being installed with the following commands and results:
root@baldur:~# aptitude search sasl
p cyrus-sasl2-dbg - Cyrus SASL - debugging symbols
p cyrus-sasl2-doc - Cyrus SASL - documentation
p cyrus-sasl2-
p cyrus-sasl2-mit-dbg - Cyrus SASL - debugging symbols for MIT modules
p gsasl - GNU SASL command line utility
p gsasl-dbg - GNU SASL debugging symbols
p libapache2-
p libauthen-
p libauthen-sasl-perl - Authen::SASL - SASL Authentication framework
p libgsasl7 - GNU SASL library
p libgsasl7-dev - Development files for the GNU SASL library
p liblua5.
p liblua5.
p libqca2-
i libsasl2-2 - Cyrus SASL - authentication abstraction library
p libsasl2-dev - Cyrus SASL - development files for authentication abstraction
i libsasl2-modules - Cyrus SASL - pluggable authentication modules
p libsasl2-
p libsasl2-
p libsasl2-
p libsasl2-
p libsasl2-
p php-auth-sasl - Abstraction of various SASL mechanism responses
p php5-sasl - Cyrus SASL extension for PHP 5
p sasl2-bin - Cyrus SASL - administration programs for SASL users database
root@baldur:~#
Note that sasl2-bin is shown as being NOT installed.
Wondering about that, I checked again by doing the following and got another result:
root@baldur:~# aptitude search sasl2-bin
i sasl2-bin - Cyrus SASL - administration programs for SASL users database
root@baldur:~#
In other words, "aptitude search sasl" tells that sasl2-bin is not installed, and "aptitude search sasl2-bin" tells that sasl2-bin is installed.
This is somehow frustrating, isn't it? Even worse, it may lead to serious consequences if the package maintaining utilities think a package is not installed although it is, or vice versa. I don't know if it's just bug in aptitude's output, or if aptitude under certain circumstances really thinks that the package in question isn't installed.
Since I am not an expert regarding apt and the package maintenance system, please tell me if you need further information to reproduce the problem.
Regards,
Binarus
Of course, I wanted to report this bug to the aptitude package!
Could some please move it over there?
Thanks,
Binarus