using apt-cache in autopkgtest and test cases

[Paul Gevers]

Hi all,

I now have a seemingly working version of autopkgtest locally where I
generalized internals of --apt-pocket to --apt-release and convert the
pocket call to a full release name.

During this work I found out that the preferences file (the apt pin
file) is blindly assigning the release as found in /etc/apt/sources.list
to the suite (a= field), while it could contain the codename (n= field).
In my current implementation I parse the output of apt-cache to
determine the the value for the a= field, but I learned that testing
with apt-cache isn't trivial as it requires all kind of files with
reasonable content in /var/lib/apt/lists/. What do you think, should I
just assume the same as the current implementation, i.e. a value that is
valid for the a= field, or should I seek harder for an other way of
checking, or should I just ignore the testing, or should I just try much
harder to create the proper files for apt-cache in the test case, or...?
(I am afraid, I can only properly answer this with: try harder to fix
the tests, without the info available to a real apt-cache, I don't
believe there is a way to keep suites and codenames apart).

Paul

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