Bug#1125317: apt: 'show -a' command shows the same outdated Description for all package versions

David Kalnischkies <[email protected]> Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:17:54 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.apt.devel
Message-ID	<acEn9GI_AqoUcCTm__39144.9547767238$1774268874$gmane$org@gosurf.lan>

Am Sun, Mar 22, 2026 at 02:59:46PM +0100, schrieb Michael Prokop:
> I also stumbled upon this, with apt v3.0.3 on trixie, because a
> transitional package wasn't displayed as such, given the wrong
> package description showed up.

This is probably the result of
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/commit/b24d6a1f3aff12f32f6a7024aac6961089f99719

As the descriptions will have the same (empty) md5 value they
are considered the same and will hence be shared across all
versions 'with the same description' (as identified by md5).


Requiring all repositories to generate their Packages files
with a Description-md5 seems kinda silly – even apt-ftparchive
does not do it. It does if you tell it to generate a Translation-en
file as its main point is linking translations together and
many (bigger) repositories split out the long descriptions
in this way, but for the smaller ones it seems overkill.


I suppose we could simply go with handling empty md5 explicitly
by not merging descriptions in that case. It's a bit wasteful I
guess, but so be it.

The alternative would be to generate some value (it doesn't
need to be MD5) and leave the rest of the code unchanged.
I think part of the motivation to remove this was also that
it "wasted" cache generation runtime for little practical gain.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

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