Bug#787437: apt-get fails to execute under fakeroot or proot

[Johannes Schauer <josch@debian.org>]

Package: apt
Version: 1.1~exp8
Severity: minor


Hi,

apt-get fails to execute under fakeroot or proot:

$ proot -0 apt-get download 0ad
E: Method gave invalid 400 URI Failure message: Could not get new groups - getgroups (22: Invalid argument)

$ fakeroot apt-get download 0ad
E: Method gave invalid 400 URI Failure message: Could not get new groups - getgroups (22: Invalid argument)

>From the source code in apt-pkg/contrib/fileutl.cc I saw that the
problem should probably go away when setting APT::Sandbox::User to the
empty string. But neither supplying

-o APT::Sandbox::User ""

or

-o APT::Sandbox::User=""

on the command line seem to work. The former gives the error:

Configuration item specification must have an =<val>

which prompted me to try the latter with the equal sign as a separator
but that does not seem to be legal.

So there are a number of issues here:

 1. apt-get cannot be called with fakeroot or proot - please make it so
    that it can "somehow" (either out of the box or by passing a config
    value like I tried)

 2. It does not seem to be possible to set empty configuration values
    from the command line (I resorted to putting it in a file in
    $APT_CONFIG)

 3. The error message seems to suggest that there is an equal sign in
    the command line configuration syntax where there is not.

Do you want separate bug reports for this? I'm not sure what of this
even constitutes a bug or a feature.

cheers, josch