Linux Mint 21.1 -- Nothing found in deb-get repo

[CalmDownMonkey]

Reporting a bug 🐛

Should this be working on Linux Mint? For about 6 months or so, it worked fine but I had to use "--include-unsupported" to list anything.
However, today, all is not well. I think it's after a big Mint update.

I think it has something to do with the first line in the output for deb-get update, where it says it can't open 01-main.repo. I don't know why this would be the case. I tried uninstalling deb-get and running the installation step again. I'm not sure what I should do from here.

Expected behavior

Listing available packages (including unsupported) should list them all, and show the ones I have installed.

Installing a package that is available according to the list in the readme should install it.

Actual behavior

Listing available packages only ever shows "deb-get" even if I use the --include-unsupported flag:

$ sudo deb-get list --include-unsupported
deb-get                         [ installed ]

Attemping to install a known package results in it telling me it is unsupported:

$ sudo deb-get install franz
  [!] ERROR! franz is not a supported application.

Steps to reproduce

Install Linux Mint as per the system information below.
Install deb-get using the step at the top of the readme.
Attempt to use the commands as listed above in "actual behaviour".

System information

Run the following a paste the output below:

/etc/os-release

cat /etc/os-release

Command not available in my OS version but I think this is the relevant info:

Operating System: Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon
Cinnamon Version: 5.6.8
Linux Kernel: 5.15.0-75-generic

deb-get version

deb-get version

0.3.9

deb-get update

deb-get update

$ sudo deb-get update
[+] Updating /etc/deb-get/01-main
tail: cannot open '/01-main.repo' for reading: No such file or directory
No URLs found in /01-main.repo.tmp.
[+] Updating cache of supported apps in the background
Hit:1 https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com stable InRelease
Ign:2 http://packages.linuxmint.com vera InRelease
Hit:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Hit:4 https://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl InRelease
Hit:5 http://packages.linuxmint.com vera Release
Hit:6 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates InRelease
Hit:8 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-backports InRelease
Hit:9 https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial InRelease
Hit:10 https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/23.04/prod lunar InRelease
Hit:11 https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable InRelease
Ign:12 https://repo.vivaldi.com/archive/deb stable InRelease
Hit:13 http://repo.sinew.in stable InRelease
Hit:14 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-security InRelease
Ign:15 https://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable InRelease
Hit:16 https://repo.vivaldi.com/archive/deb stable Release
Hit:17 https://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable Release
Hit:20 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/apandada1/foliate/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Hit:21 https://apt.syncthing.net syncthing InRelease
Hit:22 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/touchegg/stable/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Hit:23 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/unit193/encryption/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Reading package lists...
W: https://crawl.develz.org/debian/dists/crawl/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details.

[github-actions]

Hello there 👋
Thanks for submitting your first issue to the deb-get project 🐛 We'll try and take a look at your issue soon ⏲

In the meantime you might want to join the Wimpys World Discord 🗣 where we have a large community of Linux 🐧 enthusiasts and passionate open source developers 🧑‍💻

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[CalmDownMonkey]

It looks like if you delete deb-get files in /etc/deb-get and reinstall it, it works until you do anything with Mint's own update manager, after which, the behaviour in the original post above will kick in.

[philclifford]

Possibly related to #822

One thing to note: do not ever sudo deb-get ... - that often breaks things.
Please do a deb-get clean and also sudo rm /var/cache/deb-get/*lock then reinstall deb-get and do a deb-get update. Once it has finished building the cache of supported apps (wait for the background process to finish) do you still have issues ?

I have a Mint 21 with working deb-get from working on 822 so I'll take a look at updating that and see what happens.

[philclifford]

Ok - I fired up my Mint 21, deb-get update was normal (showed a pending update for deb-get, which I applied - also fine). There were lots of (~800M) of updates including kernel pending so I used the updater to apply those and reboot. deb-get still works fine and happily installed franz... I cannot reproduce your issue and am fairly certain this is all due to having run with sudo. Amongst other things the sudo environment will most likely miss the API key for github so updates and the caching will break (which will break the app's view of supported apps ....) . If you cannot get to a working state maybe pop into the discord for further help.

[CalmDownMonkey]

Apologies for the late reply -- alright, it sounds like I've over-sudo'd and caused this. That's a force of habit for Linux novices, as we usually get the idea doing anything involving adding/removing software typically needs sudo'd. Worth a wee note in the usage guide in case anyone else has this misconception?

Thanks a lot for taking the time to try it in Mint to confirm for me.

I'll be able to try this on my laptop tomorrow to see if I can get back into a working state, and if not, I'll hop onto the discord.

[CalmDownMonkey]

Ok - I fired up my Mint 21, deb-get update was normal (showed a pending update for deb-get, which I applied - also fine). There were lots of (~800M) of updates including kernel pending so I used the updater to apply those and reboot. deb-get still works fine and happily installed franz... I cannot reproduce your issue and am fairly certain this is all due to having run with sudo. Amongst other things the sudo environment will most likely miss the API key for github so updates and the caching will break (which will break the app's view of supported apps ....) . If you cannot get to a working state maybe pop into the discord for further help.

The Discord is quite quiet at the moment -- but whilst I wait, would it be possible for someone to list the steps someone should do to clean-slate a screw-up like mine? If it works on a clean VM, it theoretically should work if I manage to clean-slate deb-get somehow. I guess such steps would be handy in a troubleshooting page or the readme for anyone else that ends up with things in a mess.

[philclifford]

The docs could indeed benefit from some extra caveats and an FAQ/troubleshooting page.

As for clean-slating, my approach would be something like:

1. optionally back up /etc/deb-get/installed and /etc/deb-get/aptrepos and any overrides (/etc/deb-get/99-local.d/) or non-default external repos somewhere
2. apt remove deb-get
3. sudo rm -r /var/cache/deb-get /etc/deb-get