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 strangeā¦ 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 -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to apt in Ubuntu. 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@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. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/1864623/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp