Hi, yesterday I noticed something strange in the behavior of apt-get on my debian Jessie system. When I do apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade the system is reported as up to date, no upgrades available - fine. Now I tried and "simulated" a temporarily broken internet connection (just to see what happens, because I worked on a script that is supposed to update the package database as a cron job) with a simple ifdown eth0, then ran apt-get update again, which of course threw a bunch of errors and finally exited (as I found later to my surprise with return code 0, but this is not the point). I was quite stunned then, when a subsequent apt-get dist-upgrade reported some 30 upgradable packages. After I established the network connection again and repeated apt-get update the system was up to date again. So far, so odd.
Investigating the upgrades apt-get suggested in "offline" mode, I found that it were all packages from jessie-backports. Next thing I tried was a quick test with an old Laptop I have with an outdated LMDE install (which is basically Jessie as testing without many upgrades for 1 1/2 years or so), just to make sure the problem is not somewhere in the configuration of my desktop machine. So I added jessie-backports to the laptop's sources.list and got more or less the same result, up-to-date when online, a bunch of pending upgrades when offline. So finally I went back to my desktop machine and tried to add the debian testing repo and use pinning for it as described at https://wiki.debian.org/AptPreferences . Same result, only more dramatically looking; when online, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade report some 20 pending upgrades, repeating the procedure without network they suggest more than 1100 upgrades, which looks a lot like a whole system upgrade to testing. So this seems like pinning has no effect altogether when the network connection is down, I can hardly believe that this is supposed to be normal, is it? Or may there actually be such a bug in apt-get? Certainly this is not much trouble when the updates are handled manually, but looks it rather bad to me, when cron jobs are involved. Any insights are much appreciated. Thanks in advance, and best regards Michael .-.. .. ...- . .-.. --- -. --. .- -. -.. .--. .-. --- ... .--. . .-. Men will always be men -- no matter where they are. -- Harry Mudd, "Mudd's Women", stardate 1329.8 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150615011451.6464d5fab34f5a0a79ff9...@freenet.de