[Bug 1895011] Re: virtual-packages do not pick a seeded package (ordering dependent)

[Christian Ehrhardt ]

The avoidance only helped a short bit, it really seems to have some randomness left.
Currently it shows up again in component mismatches.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to germinate in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1895011

Title:
  virtual-packages do not pick a seeded package (ordering dependent)

Status in germinate package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Hi,
  I've started to look into what we considered a false positive in component mismatches

  o esmtp: esmtp-run
   [Reverse-Depends: logcheck (MAIN)]

  The logcheck package has:
  Depends: ... default-mta | mail-transport-agent ...

  default-mta as well as mail-transport-agent are purely virtual

  Postfix is in main and would provide both
  Package: postfix
  ...
  Provides: default-mta, mail-transport-agent

  
  But postfix does not exist on i386.

  Due to that when germinating all arches i386 will do this:
  But from the log of germinate:
   26 ? Unknown dependency default-mta by logcheck
   27 * Chose esmtp-run out of mail-transport-agent to satisfy logcheck
   28 ? Unknown dependency esmtp by esmtp-run
   29 * Chose mail-transport-agent to satisfy logcheck

  But while the non-existance of postfix at i386 is the reason it can't find default-mta
  it is unclear why it picks esmtp-run for mail-transport-agent as there would be lsb-invalid-mta that is in main even on i386.

  This can be reproduced with the simpler seeds I created:
  https://code.launchpad.net/~paelzer/ubuntu-seeds/+git/ubuntu/+ref/debug-esmtp-listing
  https://code.launchpad.net/~paelzer/ubuntu-seeds/+git/platform/+ref/debug-esmtp-listing

  Those only seed logcheck and we can see the issue.

  I'd have expected that ordering isn't important, but I've found that
  ensuring to have lsb-invalid-mta show up before logcheck will avoid
  the issue.

  Not sure how to proceed (see also the IRC discussion we had today) is
  this a bug that could be improved in germinate or am I looking the
  wrong way with this.

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/germinate/+bug/1895011/+subscriptions