Comment 19 for bug 756317

> "patch"

That would certainly be useful.

But seriously, complaining over semi-broken captive portals? You need a vacation.

Fixing an unknown number, but probably hundreds of thousands, broken routers
mostly operated by non-tech-savvy people is not going to happen in a timely manner.
They will get replaced when they fail and the replacements will have a new set of
bugs.

So where do we stand?

1. APT cannot recover from receiving broken files. This is *not* just the result of
    captive portals. Truncated files -- even zero-length files -- seem to cause it
    trouble too.

2. Anyone with a router can stop a user from getting security updates from then on.
    Just hand out an IP address and serve a broken file. Yes, that really is a security
    issue.

*You* need to stop blaming the messengers. The problem here is cutting corners in
the design: putting that amount of trust on the network is not "best practices" and
hasn't been for 3-4 decades.

I probably shouldn't write all this without being constructive myself, so here goes:

Item 1 seems to be fixable with a basic syntax check on the file. If the check fails,
toss the file and life goes on.

Item 2 is much trickier. A full fix probably requires signatures or strong checksums, i.e.,
it cannot happen in APT alone, but APT could certainly issue a "HEAD" request and
verify basic things like file length.