Package: apt
Version: 2.6.1
Followup-For: Bug #990451
X-Debbugs-Cc: debbug.990451@sideload.33mail.com

I just ran into this problem.

Scenario: I am on a limited internet connection. So if I do “aptitude
install $somepkg” which then pulls in many other packages, I need to
know which packages will be fetched from the cloud and which are
sourced from my local storage (which is the full 90gb debian release
from 4 months ago). If the download is big, it will suck the bandwidth
quota dry (which costs money).

So I tried this:

$ while read -d ' ' pkg; do apt-cache policy --no-all-versions "${pkg%%{*}"; done <\
<(yes | aptitude install $some_pkg --simulate | sed -ne '/^ /p')

non-starter:
===8<----------------------------------------
E: Command line option --no-all-versions is not understood in combination with the other options
E: Command line option --no-all-versions is not understood in combination with the other options
E: Command line option --no-all-versions is not understood in combination with the other options
E: Command line option --no-all-versions is not understood in combination with the other options
…
===8<----------------------------------------

There is a bug here no matter what, because the man page does not
disclose the narrow scope by which --no-all-versions applies. It took
trial and error with several apt-cache commands before it became
evident that it only works on the “apt-cache show” command. The show command does not give the information needed. That is, it does not
indicate the location where the candidate version will be sourced
from.

My workaround hackery is this:

$ while read -d ' ' pkg; do apt-cache policy -o APT::Cache::AllNames=false "${pkg%%{*}"; done <\
<(yes | aptitude install $some_pkg --simulate | sed -ne '/^ /p') |
sed -ne '/^[a-z]/Ip;/Version.table/{N;N;p}'

Note that “-o APT::Cache::AllNames=false” is used in vain (it has no
effect but at least it does not interfere either). The work of
suppressing the non-candidate noise is done by the last sed command.

It would be nice if I could also get a total size on any files to be
fetched. My knee-jerk thought would be to filter on all packages that
are not sourced from file:/local/filesystem, run apt-cache on that
subset to get full URLs, then do something like:

apt-cache show "$pkg" | awk '/^Size/{print $2}'

Anyway, the low-effort fix would be to at least update the man page to
state the narrow availability of --no-all-versions. Though it would be
useful if it worked for policy.

In light of my use case, you could also say it’s already hacking
territory that apt-cache was needed at all. In principle, aptitude’s installer output of how much data will be fetched should give a
breakdown of data volume to be fetched from each source location,
perhaps when run in a verbose mode.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.5
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (990, 'stable-updates'), (990, 'stable-security'), (990, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-28-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii adduser 3.134
ii debian-archive-keyring 2023.3+deb12u1
ii gpgv 2.2.40-1.1
ii libapt-pkg6.0 2.6.1
ii libc6 2.36-9+deb12u6
ii libgcc-s1 12.2.0-14
ii libgnutls30 3.7.9-2+deb12u2
ii libseccomp2 2.5.4-1+b3
ii libstdc++6 12.2.0-14
ii libsystemd0 252.22-1~deb12u1

Versions of packages apt recommends:
ii ca-certificates 20230311

Versions of packages apt suggests:
pn apt-doc <none>
ii aptitude 0.8.13-5
ii dpkg-dev 1.21.22
ii gnupg 2.2.40-1.1
ii powermgmt-base 1.37

-- no debconf information

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On Thu, May 02, 2024 at 12:40:30PM +0200, Manny wrote:

Note that “-o APT::Cache::AllNames=false” is used in vain (it has no effect but at least it does not interfere either). The work of

I think you meant All*Versions*, not Names. The later is documented to
effect `pkgnames` only. In some way, AllVersions is documented to effect `show`, but much less specific by "full records" – a record is what show displays and policy doesn't, but yeah, not really discoverable.

It would be nice if I could also get a total size on any files to be
fetched. My knee-jerk thought would be to filter on all packages that
are not sourced from file:/local/filesystem, run apt-cache on that
subset to get full URLs, then do something like:

apt-cache show "$pkg" | awk '/^Size/{print $2}'

Anyway, the low-effort fix would be to at least update the man page to
state the narrow availability of --no-all-versions. Though it would be
useful if it worked for policy.

In light of my use case, you could also say it’s already hacking
territory that apt-cache was needed at all. In principle, aptitude’s installer output of how much data will be fetched should give a
breakdown of data volume to be fetched from each source location,
perhaps when run in a verbose mode.

fwiw: I don't know about aptitude and if you think it should get some
feature I suppose you should report it there, but for apt(-get) I have
to note that both display "download size" as the size of all *.deb
files to be downloaded from non-local (that mostly means non-file:/)
sources…

They do this mostly to check if the free disk space is large enough to
hold the debs to download (while file:/ are used from there they are),
but that is close at least to your knee-jerk thought.

Not sure about the later "each source location"… that can turn out to be
a lot of details for not that much gain: a typical Debian stable has
'normal', 'updates' and 'security'. You could add 'proposed' and e.g. 'backports' and a random set of 3rd parties like the typical Ubuntu user
with seemingly 42+ PPAs added. That is 3+X counters useless even to you
as you were just interested in the data coming from your local mirror
vs. others. And that would assume that all mirrors are complete and
available, no retries, no fallbacks, no redirects.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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I think you meant All*Versions*, not Names.

Oh, right.. must have been a copy-paste error.

fwiw: I don't know about aptitude and if you think it should get some
feature I suppose you should report it there, but for apt(-get) I have
to note that both display "download size" as the size of all *.deb
files to be downloaded from non-local (that mostly means non-file:/) sources…

Thanks! That’s useful indeed.

Not sure about the later "each source location"… that can turn out to be
a lot of details for not that much gain: a typical Debian stable has 'normal', 'updates' and 'security'. You could add 'proposed' and e.g. 'backports' and a random set of 3rd parties like the typical Ubuntu user
with seemingly 42+ PPAs added. That is 3+X counters useless even to you
as you were just interested in the data coming from your local mirror
vs. others. And that would assume that all mirrors are complete and available, no retries, no fallbacks, no redirects.

Indeed the cloud vs. local counts are the most useful. I was thinking
in terms of luxury. Many different sources being fetched in parallel
would give the expectation of a fast fetch. And if some are fetched
over tor or a slow host, it would also give an indication of time. And
if something comes from a Tor source and your in a place that blocks
Tor, that’s marginally useful information. But indeed the effort
would not be justfied with apt and apt-get already giving what’s
needed.

From there, I suppose my use-case does not justify making
--no-all-versions function. But the man page should at least reflect
reality.

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