Aptitude does not show reliably if a package is installed

[Binarus]

I have set up Ubuntu 11.10 x64 "minimal install" in a virtual machine, and installed some software. I didn't use the predefined software sets like "server" or "developer", but installed single packages (and their depencies, of course) one by one. I did not alter sources.list and did no special things like pinning or so. For installing these packages, I used no other tool than aptitude.

By accident, I have found found the following misbehaviour of aptitude (I have cut every line after the second row):

root@baldur:~# aptitude search sasl2
p cyrus-sasl2-dbg
p cyrus-sasl2-doc
p cyrus-sasl2-heimdal-dbg
p cyrus-sasl2-mit-dbg
p libsasl2-2
p libsasl2-dev
p libsasl2-modules
p libsasl2-modules-gssapi-heimdal
p libsasl2-modules-gssapi-mit
p libsasl2-modules-ldap
p libsasl2-modules-otp
p libsasl2-modules-sql
p sasl2-bin
root@baldur:~# aptitude search sasl2-bin
i sasl2-bin
root@baldur:~#

In other words, "aptitude search sasl2" tells that sasl2-bin is NOT installed, but "aptitude search sasl2-bin" tells that sasl2-bin IS installed.

This may relate to the following bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/238905

But for the guy who reported it the problem mysteriously vanished without by itself, whereas in my case the problem is there for some days now, and after having installed / removed quite a bunch of software.

I am not sure if it's just a problem with aptitude's output of if there is a deeper problem. I think someone should investigate because misbehaviour of the package management system easily could render a box unusable.

I am not sure how this can be reproduced. Perhaps, it's as easy as installing sasl2-bin and no other sasl components and then repeating the commands shown above. I would be very interested if other people are experiencing this bug.

Regards,

Binarus

[Binarus (mrzx4l98d4tp89jab6giohdrj-cx5zxo-hwbqs6tox1bv6csee9psn5309)]

Well then, I had reported this yesterday already, but it magically vanished. Therefore, I have reported again.

Now I know that this was the wrong way: yesterday, got an Email from Daniel Hartwig who told me that the bug was marked as duplicate of 884945.

Thus, instead of reporting again, I should have read my email first. I apologize for that, and I'll try to close this report.

Regards,

Binarus