Synaptic internal parser for sources.list chokes on some external repos

[Sergio Callegari]

The synaptic package manager has a menu entry Settings->Repositories to configure the software repos.

When you ask for this functionality, there seem to be two possible outcomes:

1) If synaptic finds software-properties-gtk installed, then is activates it, leaving to it the task of letting the user configure the repos.

2) If it cannot find software-properties-gtk, then it resorts to an internal parser for the sources.list files (including those in sources.list.d) and it displays by itself a dialog for their configuration.

The issues are with the second scenario.

- First of all, the internal parser seems to be unable to deal with many legitimate source.list entries. For instance, it chokes on things like

deb https://download.jitsi.org unstable/ #jitsi
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/ownCloud:/desktop/Ubuntu_18.10/ / #Owncloud

- Secondly, when it gets confused with such repos, synaptic shows a contradictory behavior. First it shows a dialog saying that the problematic records are being ignored, then it shows a new dialog that should illustrate the problematic records (but for some reason rather than showing all of them, only the first one is given, twice). And finally, rather than merely ignoring the problematic records as it said, it completely gets out of the repository configuration functionality.

On a side note, I think that in case software-properties-qt is installed, synaptic should try to resort to it before falling back to the internal parser.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.10
Package: synaptic 0.84.4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.18.0-18.19-generic 4.18.20
Uname: Linux 4.18.0-18-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu13.3
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Thu May 9 09:20:50 2019
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-12-12 (1973 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Release amd64 (20131016.1)
SourcePackage: synaptic
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to cosmic on 2019-01-18 (110 days ago)