[03:57] <timrc> wgrant: Long time no speak :) I've observed strange behavior with "apt-cache show"... I was hoping you could set me straight :)
[04:00] <wgrant> timrc: Hi! It's been a while. What's the issue?
[04:01] <timrc> wgrant: This one is weird.  Ansible has a module called 'apt_repository' and this module will create a sources file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d if it doesn't already exist and give it a file mode.  This file mode _weirdly_ defaults to 420 (root user readable, root group writeable)
[04:02] <wgrant> That sounds like a very special module.
[04:02] <timrc> If you were to "apt-cache show some-package" as a non-root user, apt-cache show wouldn't find anything.
[04:03] <timrc> The reason _seems_ to be that it scans /etc/apt/sources.list.d and if it can _open_ the file, it will use it when scanning /var/lib/apt/lists
[04:03] <timrc> But in my case the user executing "apt-cache show" can read the /var/lib/apt/lists location.
[04:04] <timrc> So I could literally grep for the package I'm interested in /var/lib/apt/lists but I could not discover it using "apt-cache show"
[04:05] <wgrant> timrc: That's normal. /etc/apt/sources.list and co are all meant to be world-readable.
[04:05] <wgrant> There are separate files for creds if need be.
[04:06] <timrc> Okay so the assumption is that you're not using weird modes on /etc/apt/sources.list
[04:06] <timrc> Though wouldn't it be better to just do the c++ equivalent of "ls -1 /etc/apt/sources.list" and use that to compose your search space?
[04:07] <timrc> Oh wait scratch that, it needs the url to reconstruct the cache file name.
[04:10] <timrc> wgrant: Thanks =)
[04:15] <wgrant> timrc: Right, it could approximate that by just looking at every file in /var/lib/apt/lists, but there can be other properties in sources.list (eg. disabling signature verification) that mean it can't really do that.
[04:21] <timrc> Wow... so the person who wrote this module had the right idea.  This is a real bug... the default mode is 0644, but he does int('0644', 8) which turns it into 420 and then I guess does a chmod 420 on the file.
[04:22] <wgrant> Heh
[04:22] <wgrant> That'd do it.
[04:22] <timrc> I just thought he was smoking pot.