Package: apt-offline
Version: 1.7.2
During the initial sync of the APT database in apt-offline (apt-offline
install target/ --verbose), apt-offline kept failing with errors like
"Failed to sync file
/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/deb.debian.org_debian_dists_stretch_main_binary-amd64_Packages".
After debugging, I finally realized that the issue was on a missing
python-lzma on the offline machine, failing silently.
Please consider the following:
- In this use case, apt-offline is being used to maintain a reasonably
air-gapped machine, which means it was never connected to any network.
- This means that the initial APT database update also depended on
apt-offline. There was no online database update whatsoever.
- The missing LZMA module was NOT apparent, not even with --verbose
- The following lines in
/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt_offline_core/AptOfflineLib.py are
especially significant, as they are effectively a silent failure:
-------------------
try:
import lzma
except ImportError:
modLZMA = False
-------------------
- Considering that, at least in Debian 9, using the default
deb.debian.org entry in sources.list, the database files are xzipped
(therefore, depending on python-lzma), this is a problem, and the error
message is misleading.
Given this scenario, I suggest the Debian package to have python-lzma in
Depends instead of Recommends, and/or the upstream apt-offline to
present more information if the module lzma is not available, even if
only with --verbose, and especially when that is a cause of failure.
I know that the current versions are written in Python 3, but as long as
Debian 9 is the current stable, this issue may burn someone else.
Thank you for your attention,
Valmiky Arquissandas
