[Aptitude-devel] Bug#629590: aptitude: Fails to obey '-o "#clear DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs; "'

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: tags -1 + moreinfo


Hi Nick,

2011-06-07 22:51 Nick Phillips:
>Package: aptitude
>Version: 0.6.3-3.2
>Severity: normal
>
>The command line:
>apt-get -q -y -o "#clear DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs;" install somepkg
>
>still causes dpkg-preconfigure to be used to preconfigure packages, when the line:
>DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs {"/usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt || true";};
>
>is present in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf
>
>
>The equivalent invocation of apt-get successfully inhibits the preconfiguration.
>I note that:
>apt-config -o "#clear DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs;" dump
>
>fails to parse the option and barfs, insisting that the option must contain an "=".
>Perhaps this is related?

As discussed in the bug submitted to apt (#656844), probably this never
worked, the syntax in config variables passed with command line and the
syntax in config files is different, and #clear has never been
supported.


>From apt.conf:

    All of the APT tools take an -o option which allows an arbitrary
    configuration directive to be specified on the command line. The
    syntax is a full option name (APT::Get::Assume-Yes for instance)
    followed by an equals sign then the new value of the option. To
    append a new element to a list, add a trailing :: to the name of the
    list. (As you might suspect, the scope syntax can't be used on the
    command line.)

and DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs uses a "scope".


2012-01-22 09:19 Daniel Hartwig:
>
>I have submitted a patch to support this in libapt-pkg [1].

>From the discussion in the bug report above, this is unlikely to happen,
at least with that patch.

One suggestion was to implement "--clear-option" instead.

However, if apt-* don't support this yet, I am not sure if aptitude
should, so this needs further consideration.


>Aptitude
>should soon make use of the same library to parse its command-line
>[2], which will resolve this issue.
>
>Otherwise, it is simple to implement the same patch is aptitude's
>current parser.
>
>[1] http://bugs.debian.org/656844
>[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=aptitude/aptitude.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/wip-cmdline

This branch never came to be merged, so this doesn't apply now.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>