Package: aptitude Version: 0.8.3-1 Severity: important This was the expected behavior since ages(tm) with aptitude:
# aptitude --version
aptitude 0.7.5
[...]
# apt-cache policy aufs-tools
aufs-tools:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: (none)
Version table:
# aptitude install aufs-tools
No candidate version found for aufs-tools
No candidate version found for aufs-tools
No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
[..]
# echo $?
0
Now starting with aptitude 0.7.6 (and it also applies to most recent
version v0.8.3) we get this behavior instead:
# aptitude --version
aptitude 0.7.6
[...]
# aptitude install aufs-tools
No candidate version found for aufs-tools
Unable to apply some actions, aborting
# echo $?
255
This seems to be what's documented as follows inside
/usr/share/aptitude/NEWS:
* [cmdline] Abort with Failure when actions cannot be taken
(Closes: #121313, #430392, #445034, #498239, #576212, #639789, #798320)
But this actually breaks automated installations, where situations
like above with non-existing packages might be present and are
expected or at least accepted.
To provide an example for such a use case: the Grml.org live system
has daily ISO builds using grml-live and its underlying FAI
software. Now with aptitude version >=0.7.6 whenever a single Debian
package is missing in the Debian archive (like with aufs-tools in
Debian/testing in the above example) the ISO can't be generated at
all because the aptitude command fails hard. (JFTR, the validation
about the package installation state takes place at a later stage in
the ISO build process. For expected but non-present packages this
marks the build as unstable instead of stable, but it does *not*
fail the build.)
Assuming that you don't want to switch back to the previous command
line behavior please at least consider providing an option
(APT::Get::...) to not abort with a failure in such a situation, so
the previous behavior can be restored in tools like FAI through that
option. (I think this issue *could* actually warrant an RC bug
severity since that behavior change might bite users in automated
scripts.)
regards,
-mika-
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