Bug#1078608: apt update silently leaves old index data

Ben Hutchings <[email protected]> Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:18:39 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.apt.devel
Message-ID	<220c695b2081bd2a92082629283bbbf04c9f0bb9.camel__12154.5660121896$1745763691$gmane$org@decadent.org.uk>

On Fri, 18 Apr 2025 13:24:33 +0200 David Kalnischkies
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Am Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 11:30:12AM +0200, schrieb Laurent Bigonville:
> > > The interesting thing to discover now is what happened in these 24
hours
> > > on your system that lists/ got a new Release file (or, well
InRelease),
> > > but not new indexes… unsurprisingly that shouldn't happen, but so
far
> > > nobody has provided any leads as people notice only after the fact
and
> > > at that point any debugging is pointless.
> > 
> > It's a laptop with a desktop environment and PackageKit is
installed, not
> > sure whether PK could impact this. Also the laptop has been probably
> > restarted in between so that means that PK has restarted and
probably tried
> > to update the indexes.
> 
> Well, while all front ends do share code and logic via libapt, there
is
> always the possibility of the front end holding it wrong. And there is
> never an easy tell which config they are using. (At least I don't
know…)
> 
> Anecdotal evidence suggests its some front end as I don't use any and
> don't have that problem, while initial reporter here claim they have
it
> only on one system – while all likely have apt installed, so a general
> problem would appear in general… of course, that is a rather weak
> approach especially as this is both usually a silent issue and
> a self-healing one, but its all we have so far…
> Or if you will: +moreinfo +unreproducible.
[...]

I kept a VM snapshot from one time this happened (in August 2024).  As I
offered before, I can run any tests you like on it.  Having read the
information added by Laurent I did some more testing today:

- If I boot this snapshot normally then the InRelease files, but not the
  Packages files, get updated to the current versions.  After that
  'apt update' unsurprisingly does nothing.

  The automatic update of those files was presumably done by
  PackageKit.

- If I mask packagekit.service before booting (using a rescue shell), 
  then none of the files are updated automatically.  Running 'apt
  update' updates them all as expected.

So it seems like this problem may be specific to PackageKit.

Sven and Laurent, do your affected systems have PackageKit installed?

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
When in doubt, use brute force. - Ken Thompson

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