[Bug 1655431] Re: update-notifier / ttf-mscorefonts-installer download failure (regression)

[Adrien Beau]

*** This bug is a duplicate of bug 1651923 ***
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1651923

Investigations (comments #1 and #5) indicate that the apt package is the
most likely culprit. Quite possibly the update to 1.2.15 on Xenial
caused the regression.

** Package changed: update-notifier (Ubuntu) => apt (Ubuntu)

** Summary changed:

- update-notifier / ttf-mscorefonts-installer download failure (regression)
+ apt-helper / update-notifier / ttf-mscorefonts-installer download failure (regression)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1655431

Title:
  apt-helper / update-notifier / ttf-mscorefonts-installer download
  failure (regression)

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  * OS release: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
  * Package version: 3.168.3

  For the past few days (maybe even weeks for other users), update-
  notifier has been very repeatedly failing to handle the downloads for
  ttf-mscorefonts-installer. Previously it was working fine on the same
  system.

  This seems to affect a lot of desktop users, but the issue is usually
  misdiagnosed on forums because it is attributed to ttf-mscorefonts-
  installer and not to update-notifier-common.

  The issue is made particularly irritating because the update-notifier
  cron job tries and fails and notifies users daily of this failure.

  The issue can be reproduced by having ttf-mscorefonts-installer
  installed, and running:

      sudo dpkg-reconfigure update-notifier-common

  The error messages seem to be random but actually appear to be
  consistent for a given download source:

  * freefr.dl.sourceforge.net: 404  Not Found
  * kent.dl.sourceforge.net: Protocol "http" not supported or disabled in libcurl
  * netassist.dl.sourceforge.net: The HTTP server sent an invalid Content-Range header Bad header data [IP: 62.205.134.42 80]
  * netcologne.dl.sourceforge.net: The HTTP server sent an invalid Content-Range header
  * netix.dl.sourceforge.net: 404  Not Found
  * vorboss.dl.sourceforge.net: 404  Not Found

  In all above cases, the reported failing URL can be downloaded just
  fine using wget.

  Some other mirrors appear to work (unfortunately, mirror names are
  only printed in case of errors). However, since ttf-mscorefonts-
  installer triggers 11 downloads in a row, chances of randomly getting
  11 working mirrors are very low.

  I am tagging this as regression-update because the issue started
  happening when upgrading from 3.168.2 to 3.168.3 last Friday. It is of
  course entirely possible the root cause is in another package, but
  this would also likely be a regression-update, since I am very careful
  about system-wide changes on this machine.

  The previous update from 3.168.1 to 3.168.2 on November 4th went just
  fine. ttf-mscorefonts-installer has been installed (just fine) on
  September 26th, and not upgraded since then.

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