dselect displays the above on a system that has either an empty or non-existent /etc/apt/sources.list file. Meanwhile dselects' APT method obviously can use /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.[list|sources] as normal. However, the above prompt is misleading.

Perhaps dselect should be updated to list all files found in /etc/apt/sources.list[.d/*] and omit empty files?

Martin-Éric

Hi!

This is not related to the apt source.list files or their format. This
is a recent change that switched the «dpkg --update-avail» invocation
to get its input from a «apt-cache dumpavail» pipe instead of having
to use a temporary file, which nowadays can be large.

https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/commit/4d6fcb1dddd5654e7ba8bfa2705bbb4f2c4a6884

I've updated the information message in dpkg to print in this case the
following text instead:

  ,---
  Replacing available packages information from <standard input>.
  `---

Which should be more clear, but I'm not sure whether it would help
with the confusion reported here? Otherwise, except for completely
suppressing the message from the apt's dselect method (in which case
this would need to be reassigned into apt), there's not much I think
can be done.

Thanks,
Guillem

la 8.11.2025 klo 19.34 Guillem Jover (guillem@debian.org) kirjoitti:

TBH, if /var/cache/apt/available simply is no longer used, keeping the
message doesn't accomplish much.

Martin-Éric

[ Leaving enough context for the apt cloned bug. ]

Hi!

Ok, let's do that as well then. I'm keeping this report in dpkg, for
the message update, and cloning it to apt to suppress the message,
which the attached patch should do.

Thanks,
Guillem

Thanks for cloning this just for the APT part of the questions..

Now, I'd like to hear whether the APT team will merge your patch.

Martin-Éric