Duplicate package entries shown when listing by package origin

[Rik Mills]

Synaptic 0.83 (also was in 0.82.5 I believe)

- Ubuntu Xenial

What should happen:

Synaptic should as previously show a single item for each package when viewing package list from a particular 'origin'.

What does happen:

For many packages up to 4 identical entries are shown for each package. See attached screencap.

Duplicate list items are quite literally identical and are true duplicates as they relate to the identical package in all respects, including full version. In fact, so much so, that selecting one of a duplicate for an operation such as install/upgrade/remove etc selects and then operates on all the duplicate entries as well.

Same problem has been noted on a real machine and in VM running variants of Xenial - Xubuntu/Kubuntu etc, with or with any ppas present on system.

[Rik Mills (rikmills)]

Cannot replicate in same version in debian unstable, so seems to be ubuntu specific

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jeffery Wilkins (djcanadianjeff)]

I can reproduce this same bug please help

[Rik Mills (rikmills)]

Have upgraded another systems to Xenia with resultant synaptic 0.83, which is now suffering exactly the same problem.

As does a freshly installed Xenial in a virtual machine

[dino99 (9d9)]

Never met such issue with the actual (nor prior) 0.83
I suppose the xapian index is borked; i propose to purge (complete removal) both synaptic and apt-xapian-index, then reinstall them.
Do you have some non genuine packages installed which could disturbate the index ? (ppa, ...) or get some errors about wrong rights applied ?

[Rik Mills (rikmills)]

>Never met such issue with the actual (nor prior) 0.83
>I suppose the xapian index is borked; i propose to purge (complete removal) both synaptic and apt-xapian-index, then reinstall them.

Yes, did both those on each machine.

> Do you have some non genuine packages installed which could disturbate the index ? (ppa, ...) or get some errors about wrong rights applied ?

No to those. As said, it happens on a clean install with no 3rd party sources, as well as upgraded machines.

[Rik Mills (rikmills)]

muon package manager, witch also reads those sources and apt-xapian index, shows no duplicates

[Bryan Simmons (bryansimmons)]

Occurring in version .81.1 (Ubuntu 14.04). Apply Quick Filter and list displays single entries, remove filter and duplicates reappear.

[Jeffery Wilkins (djcanadianjeff)]

what needs to be done to help move this bug along before xenial xerus is launched

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[hda_launchpad (hda-me)]

Anyone tried to fix this bug? I tried building with old ui files from trusty and checked synaptic source without any success.
I think It maybe something with apt-xapian-index. Will try to downgrade it today to take a look.

[hda_launchpad (hda-me)]

xapian index works correctly (after rebuild too) ether. But I see duplicate entries in synaptic anyway.

[pelm (pelle-ekh)]

I have the same behaviour also without apt-xapian-index installed, mostly up to four duplicates but even eight occur (Ubuntu 16.04). But it's only in the origin-section. All the others behave normally. Synaptic is working ok for the rest, installing packages etc.

[Coeur Noir (coeur-noir)]

Same problem here https://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=1990005 when packages are filtered through « origin »

and it seems that synaptic in debian stretch shows same behavior https://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?pid=21515571#p21515571

I'm using ubuntu 16.04. Did not notice that problem in 14.04.

[Coeur Noir (coeur-noir)]

The problem does not occur on a 32bits-only installation.

Maybe that old bug is relative https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=633825 ?

[Coeur Noir (coeur-noir)]

Is this any relevant ?

test@Asgard:~$ sudo update-apt-xapian-index
[sudo] Mot de passe de test :
The index /var/lib/apt-xapian-index is up to date
Exception ignored in: <bound method ServerProgress.__del__ of <axi.indexer.ServerProgress object at 0x7f78e07c6588>>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/axi/indexer.py", line 306, in __del__
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not callable
test@Asgard:~$

[AO (aofrl10n)]

This bug is also present in Yakkety.

[Laziz Rashidov (lazizrashidov-deactivatedaccount)]

I also noticed this bug in ubuntu 16.04.1. Plese, fix this problem...

[ObrienDave (truckinpapa)]

Bug appears when you select a specific origin.
Not all origins have duplicates.
Using the ALL filter does not reproduce duplicates

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

Got this bug in Origin view on Ubuntu Xenial with all updates installed.

It seems that bug in Debian is the same - see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=864654 .
Should we report this bug to upstream? Where is its upstream?

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

This bug exists in Linux Mint 18.3 (Sylvia, xenial-based):

synaptic shows duplicate entries for packages.linuxmint.com Origins.

$ apt-cache policy synaptic
synaptic:
  Installed: 0.83linuxmint4
  Candidate: 0.83linuxmint4
  Version table:
 *** 0.83linuxmint4 700
        700 http://packages.linuxmint.com sylvia/upstream amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0.83 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages

Very annoying bug!

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

18.04 LTS with all updates, bug exists.

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

18.04 LTS beta2 with all updates, bug exists.

[htrex (hantarex)]

18.04.1 LTS and still seeing the bug

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

Still happens on groovy.

[c. Kimna (kristatos)]

Same here (Focal), every package is shown 2-5 times in the Synaptic lists. I cleaned and reloaded all, no difference, the bug still occures.

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

Reported upstream as https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/issues/58

[Ján Koštial (jan-kostial)]

The same problem in Linux Mint (Ubuntu derivative).

I think duplicates are showing when the same package exists in two or more repos.
Synaptic is combining package with repo so if package exists in two repos then the 4 identical packages are displayed (2 repos x 2 packages)...

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

Still happens on Jammy. How long?