On Sat, 20 Jun 2015 10:45:16 Chris Samuel said,
On Sat, 20 Jun 2015 10:25:15 AM zlinw@mcmedia.com.au wrote:
I am NOT dreamming this up, I did an apt-get update followed by an apt dist-upgrade to check this out,and the val/lib/dpkg/availibilty file was not touched
My wild guess is that you're looking at the atime of the file, and if your kernel has relatime set (which has been the default for a while) then that won't get updated if the file hasn't been modified since the last time anything accessed it (unless it's a day or more since the last access, when >it will get updated).
I am going to stick to my guns here, in this case when dselect update was done the availibilty files creation time was set to 0810, the time the file was writen to. Apt-get update, and apt dist-upgrade was done at 1010 the availibilty files creation time stayed at 0810, also its size did _Not_ change. This would seem to indicate the file was not writen to. I checked this again just now, apt-get update does not write to this file, where as dselect update does. Doing an strace on apt-get update shows it writes to files in the /var/lib/apt/lists directory and to the /var/lib/dpkg/status file but it does __not__ write to the availibilty file. So on my systems apt and dselect do have a different idea of what is availible. Lindsay