[Aptitude-devel] Bug#841506: aptitude: cannot reinstall package available as update

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi Jonas,

2017-04-18 21:54 Jonas Smedegaard:
>Quoting Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo (2017-04-18 21:01:41)
>> So I am not sure what's going on, but I don't think that reinstalling is
>> missing from the logic related with 'G'.
>>
>> Perhaps it's related with the package half-broken state in dpkg that
>> this could not proceed, or some temporary inconsistency between
>> aptitude<->apt or apt<->dpkg; but indeed it does not seem to be a
>> problem in the common case.
>
>Yes, Most certainly relates to the package being half-broken in dpkg.
>Listing events, rephrased from my initial post to this bugreport:
>
> 1) A package went into a semi-broken state needing reinstall
> 2) Aptitude proxied dpkg error about 1)
> 3) Attempt to use the aptitude way to reinstall fails
>
>The bug tracked in this bugreport is 3), triggered by 1).
>
>
>Yes, 1) is rare and 1) occuring while using aptitude even more rare. Not
>sure why you mention that, however.  That does not make the bug go away.

My comment was not directly addressed to you as submitter, sorry for not
making that clear.

It was just to set on record for my future-self or other people
investigating this bug report later (possibly months or years down the
line) that the code paths related to reinstalling were tested a lot
during my investigation of the other bug report, both UI and command
line, and under different conditions (package available in repository,
package obsolete, package obsolete but files downloaded locally; and
same with scheduled actions and slightly different conditions --forced
internal variables and code paths due to debugging the problem--),
without ever getting the same behaviour as described here.

Since I tend to rely on my last comments on the issue when revisiting
bugs, I just wanted to give an update on the current situation, before I
forget my recent investigation on the other bug report.


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