improve backportpackage error message

Bug #1726483 reported by Leopold Talirz
12
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
ubuntu-dev-tools (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I'm running Ubuntu xenial and wanted to backport a package from zesty (my first backport). I tried:

$ backportpackage -u ppa:leopold-talirz/xenial-science-backports cp2k
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/backportpackage", line 416, in <module>
    sys.exit(main(sys.argv))
  File "/usr/bin/backportpackage", line 393, in main
    config)
  File "/usr/bin/backportpackage", line 210, in find_package
    source_release = info().devel()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/distro_info.py", line 96, in devel
    raise DistroDataOutdated()
distro_info.DistroDataOutdated: Distribution data outdated. Please check for an update for distro-info-data. See /usr/share/doc/distro-info-data/README.Debian for details.

First, /usr/share/doc/distro-info-data/README.Debian did not exist.
Then, I tried to update everything I could think of, but as far as I could tell everything was already up to date.
I then dug into /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/distro_info.py and it turns out the reason it failed is that there simply was no release matching the criteria of a "development release" (namely: either no release date or release date in the future).
Indeed, backportpackage -h says

  -s SOURCE, --source=SOURCE
                        Backport from SOURCE release (default: devel release)

Simply specifying '-s zesty' solved it for me, but I spent quite a while trying to figure out what the problem was.

If my reasoning is correct, then one should not raise a DistroDataOutdated() exception in line 96 of distro_info.py but rather let the user know that no development release was found and suggest different options (updating or specifying a non-development release by hand).

Tags: xenial
description: updated
tags: added: xenial
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

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

Changed in ubuntu-dev-tools (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.

Other bug subscribers

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.