Comment 16 for bug 2000832

I traced this problem on my machine, and it was something very unexpected.

All my repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list were disabled: on some machines, they were commented out with # symbols. On others the lines were missing. (My original installation of Ubuntu 13.10 has been copied from one machine to another several times.)

The `software-settings-gtk` app did not notice and was happy to change mirrors, even though it wasn't actually looking at any of them.

I had so many other repos configured that every update fetched some updates, of other packages, and looked normal if I didn't pay close attention.

Restoring the default set of repos from a clean install caused about 1GB of updates to be found and installed. Then, changing mirrors started to work correctly, too.

Once updated, I could install the WINE packages from WINEHQ.

I think Ubuntu needs an `apt-lint` or `aptck` or comparable tool, which is able to check that repos are set to sane values, confirm they work, and automatically fix them to the local geolocated default mirrrors.

Since I discovered this issue I found it affected several of my machines. Related issues I have discovered:

* APT defaults to trying to fetch over IPv6 but only a local IPv6 connection is available (not routed to the outside world) so it fails.

* APT uses HTTPS but only HTTP works from some mirror servers.

* Mirrors that only work intermittently so dependencies can't be fetched.

* ISPs that block Github (!)

General message: bizarre software installation problems? Check your repositories. You may find you have none. Check that you have valid entries in `/etc/apt/sources.list`, check that you can `ping` those servers, check that you machine can download from them over your selected protocol. If you are not sure, change to a different mirror, just in case.