ppa-purge

Packages might get downgraded to stable release version ignoring active updates/security archives

Bug #1121325 reported by immerrr again on 2013-02-10

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	ppa-purge	Triaged	Low	Unassigned

Bug Description

I've tried to purge ppa:webapps/preview from my Ubuntu precise installation, but stumbled upon weird behavior: ppa-purge offered to downgrade my 'chromium-browser' package to 18.0.XXXX (from precise/universe) despite the fact that I had had it at version 24.0.XXX (from precise-security/universe) and it had never been installed from that ppa.

I've done some initial research (you can see the full log of ppa-purge command attached) and it appears that ppa-purge fails to remove some of the packages with apt-get since they don't exist in precise archive, then falls back to aptitude and the latter handles "PACKAGE/ARCHIVE" specification differently:

$ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser/precise
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
chromium-browser is already the newest version.
Selected version '24.0.1312.56-0ubuntu0.12.04.1' (Ubuntu:12.04/precise-security [amd64]) for 'chromium-browser'
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

$ aptitude show chromium-browser/precise | grep -i version
Version: 18.0.1025.151~r130497-0ubuntu1

$ aptitude show chromium-browser/precise-security | grep -i version
Version: 24.0.1312.56-0ubuntu0.12.04.1

And it requires some tinkering with its query language to make aptitude print expected version:

$ aptitude show '?name(^chromium-browser$)?archive(precise)?architecture(native)' | grep -i version
Version: 24.0.1312.56-0ubuntu0.12.04.1

Aptitude version:
$ aptitude show aptitude | grep -i version
Version: 0.6.6-1ubuntu1.1

ppa-purge version:
$ aptitude show ppa-purge | grep -i version
Version: 0.2.8+bzr56

Related branches

~jarnos/ppa-purge:master

Ready for review for merging into ppa-purge:master

ppa-purge: Pending requested 2016-12-12

Revision history for this message

immerrr again (immerrr-k) wrote on 2013-02-10:

ppa_purge.log Edit (31.3 KiB, text/plain)

Tim Lunn (darkxst) on 2015-12-11

Changed in ppa-purge:
status:	New → Triaged
importance:	Undecided → Low

Revision history for this message

Jarno Suni (jarnos) wrote on 2016-12-21:

I see the issue with aptitude here, but I think ppa-purge was not supposed to work, if the pkgs are not available for precise. Which release was there for the pkgs then? "apt-cache policy <pkgname>" shows.

BTW If there are pkg available in r.g. trusty-updates, "apt-get install <pkgname>/trusty" seems to use it.

Revision history for this message

Jarno Suni (jarnos) wrote on 2016-12-21:

ppa-purge should not try to install packages that are not available after disabling the repository. That is fixed in ppa-purge - 0.2.8+bzr63.

Revision history for this message

immerrr again (immerrr-k) wrote on 2016-12-21:

It has been a while.

Judging by my post I think I suspected that aptitude treated <pkgname>/precise as <pkgname>/<suite> rather than <pkgname>/<codename>, resulting in a weird downgrade, but it appears that at least on 16.04 it behaves as I'd expect.

I'm no longer using 12.04, so it might take me a while to fire up a VM to respond to the request.

Revision history for this message

Jarno Suni (jarnos) wrote on 2016-12-21:

In xenial

aptitude show chromium-browser/xenial | grep -i version

still gives earlier version than

aptitude show chromium-browser/xenial-security | grep -i version

so in that sense the bug still exist. It is just that aptitude is not used in this case by default, unless you use -i option.

Revision history for this message

immerrr again (immerrr-k) wrote on 2016-12-21:

Hmm, seems to work for me:

$ aptitude show chromium-browser/xenial | grep -i version
Version: 55.0.2883.87-0ubuntu0.16.04.1263
Description: Chromium web browser, open-source version of Chrome

$ aptitude show chromium-browser/xenial-security | grep -i version
Version: 55.0.2883.87-0ubuntu0.16.04.1263
Description: Chromium web browser, open-source version of Chrome

Revision history for this message

Jarno Suni (jarnos) wrote on 2016-12-21:

Strange, my xenial shows version 49 in the former case.

Revision history for this message

immerrr again (immerrr-k) wrote on 2016-12-21:

If that's of any help:

$ aptitude --version
aptitude 0.7.4 compiled at Dec 9 2015 19:30:45
Compiler: g++ 5.3.1 20151207
Compiled against:
  apt version 5.0.0
  NCurses version 6.0
  libsigc++ version: 2.6.2
  Gtk+ support disabled.
  Qt support disabled.

Current library versions:
  NCurses version: ncurses 6.0.20160213
  cwidget version: 0.5.17
  Apt version: 5.0.0

Revision history for this message

Jarno Suni (jarnos) wrote on 2016-12-21:

Exactly the same here. Both 32 bit and 64 bit installations.