[Bug 1864623] Re: apt-get attempts to download Packages.xz which is not InRelease and does not exist

Wed Feb 26 09:17:06 UTC 2020

The cake is a lie.

--print-uris does *NOT* print the URIs an "apt update" is bound to use.
It can't because it doesn't download any file and it would need to
download at least the (current) InRelease file to answer that. So what
it does is print the URIs it would download IF everything would exist
and be advertised in the (In)Release file.

The option is from a time the answer was a lot easier to answer (a long
time ago), but nowadays apt supports too many optional features which
are handled at runtime to make accurate predictions (especially) about
the future.

So, your problem is elsewhere. Please check what "update" says. What a
following install command says and verify that the deb file it wants to
download actually exists. "~Ubuntu" in the version seems kinda strange…
usually its lowercase. Either is fine, but consistency is key: apt as
most tools in Linux is case-sensitive. Anyway, with the current set of
information we can only make very wild guesses.

** Changed in: apt (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Invalid

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1864623

Title:
  apt-get attempts to download Packages.xz which is not InRelease and
  does not exist

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  When trying to install the latest virtualbox-6.0 from virtualbox.org,
  we got a failure:

  Err:1 http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian xenial/contrib amd64 virtualbox-6.0 amd64 6.0.16-135674~Ubuntu~xenial
    404  Not Found
  E: Failed to fetch http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/pool/contrib/v/virtualbox-6.0/virtualbox-6.0_6.0.16-135674~Ubuntu~xenial_amd64.deb  404  Not Found

  We expected that this was a case of `apt-get update` not having been run before `apt-get install`, but turns out it's a bit more interesting:

  apt-get update fetched the following files:

  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ apt-get --print-uris update |grep virtualbox
  'http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/xenial/InRelease' download.virtualbox.org_virtualbox_debian_dists_xenial_InRelease 0 
  'http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/xenial/contrib/binary-amd64/Packages.xz' download.virtualbox.org_virtualbox_debian_dists_xenial_contrib_binary-amd64_Packages 0 
  'http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/xenial/contrib/binary-all/Packages.xz' download.virtualbox.org_virtualbox_debian_dists_xenial_contrib_binary-all_Packages 0 
  'http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/xenial/contrib/i18n/Translation-en.xz' download.virtualbox.org_virtualbox_debian_dists_xenial_contrib_i18n_Translation-en 0 

  http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/xenial/InRelease
  returns 200 and lists a bunch of Packages lists. However, it does
  *not* list contrib/binary-amd64/Packages.xz, only:

  - contrib/binary-amd64/Packages
  - contrib/binary-amd64/Packages.gz
  - contrib/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2

  For some reason, apt still attempts to download the .xz files, and
  does not even report an error for them!

  Trying to download the file locally, I get a 404, but with an HTML
  error page as the content:

  $ curl -v 'http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/xenial/contrib/binary-amd64/Packages.xz' | head -n 20
    % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                   Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
    0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0*   Trying 2.22.40.42...
  * TCP_NODELAY set
  * Connected to download.virtualbox.org (2.22.40.42) port 80 (#0)
  > GET /virtualbox/debian/dists/xenial/contrib/binary-amd64/Packages.xz HTTP/1.1
  > Host: download.virtualbox.org
  > User-Agent: curl/7.58.0
  > Accept: */*
  > 
    0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:--     0< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
  < Accept-Ranges: bytes
  < Content-Type: text/html
  < ETag: "477d9862374177c810b0b7d73b4f1e53:1531792454.541174"
  < Last-Modified: Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:28:54 GMT
  < Server: AkamaiNetStorage
  < Content-Length: 7073
  < Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:08:16 GMT
  < Connection: keep-alive
  < 
  { [7073 bytes data]
  100  7<html>
  <head>
  <title>Error Page 404</title>
  <base href="http://download.oracle.com/index.html" />
  <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/errors/us/assets/hp-styles.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/errors/us/assets/master-master.css" />

  I think it's a bug that:
  a) apt tries to download Packages files not listed in InRelease
  b) apt does not report errors on 404 it gets when downloading them

  It is of course possible that apt get a *different* InRelease and a
  *different* response when trying to download the .xz files, but that
  seems unlikely. If you want to, I can try to confirm the actual
  network traffic.

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