[Bug 756317] Re: Captive portals may corrupt apt package lists

[David Kalnischkies]

Well, there is a magical word which helps in getting everything you want
and the word is: "patch", but I don't see one here… doesn't seem THAT
important after all it seems.

That recent reporters all complain about Translation-* files is btw only possible because not all repositories (read: nobody expect Debian itself) provide checksums for these files in the (In)Release file [some provide a i18n/Index file with similar content which was used for a while as a stopgap, but it was deemed to hard to support unsigned, stopgap and signed properly in apt and as everyone could just switch to the real thing the stopgap was dropped…]. If they would, they wouldn't need to implement a "Fix MergeList problem" button, but buttons are easier than fixing the repository creation process used internally by your own distribution of course… just saying…
(it would solve a few more issues of course, but given that not even this problem is helping the adoption I doubt any other would… I at least gave up years ago)
[Well, you would still see this with repositories without a Release file of course]

Oh, and while at it tell all your captive portal providers to do their
job properly and report that they are one (e.g. "511 Network
Authentication Required" and similar such instead of "200 OK" while
nothing is "okay", okay?).

For both things you probably can't provide a patch, so that is were you
should complain, not here, were you could provide one but nobody does.
APT is just the messenger here and you should never kill the messenger
for the content of the message… even if it is a HTML message and you
expected a deb822 one.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/756317

Title:
  Captive portals may corrupt apt package lists

Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “apt” package in Debian:
  New

Bug description:
  I have an adsl modem which returns an html page if the adsl link is
  broken. This page ends as the content of the apt cache files stored in
  /var/lib/apt/lists, which breaks apt.

  The only way to make apt work again is to delete all the files stored
  in /var/lib/apt/lists.

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