Debian feed not working

[gravufo]

I set up a debian/apt feed and I can't seem to be able to use it.

I ran the following commands on the client machine:

wget -O "deb.gpg" https://<URL>/debian-feeds/buster.pub && sudo apt-key add "deb.gpg"
echo "deb https://<URL>/ buster main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/proget.list

And then running sudo apt update returns the following:

W: Invalid 'Date' entry in Release file /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/<URL>_dists_buster_Release

I managed to output the file and it looks like this:

Components: main
Architectures: amd64
Codename: buster
Description: Debian Buster
MD5Sum:
 main/binary-amd64/Packages 2936 ac4e38f0cb4bf881ae144c869cbe6a31
SHA1:
 main/binary-amd64/Packages 2936 e5f5f4aa00f4c30ece4d3e1d8fe6376ab7732c52
SHA256:
 main/binary-amd64/Packages 2936 89c24f7996767b72b4244371e2d570993926f2628bb6dca6ff9f2ec197ab7c1c
SHA512:
 main/binary-amd64/Packages 2936 611e7e1155511ab081ffe8bdc5b39a1a776d7647ff212ed23349c7abd28d05dad038be75bdb53a46871dec01215e795be7919da8ebd1de03ff6c271a1410d241

Any clue as to what's happening?

Thanks

[ben]

Hello @gravufo,

This is only a warning, not an error, so the Debian feed's packages should still be accessible from apt.

The reason we don't have a Date entry in the Release file is that Date represents when the Release file was last generated, and ProGet generates the Release file for each request.

This would be fine if everything used the InRelease file, but a lot of tools still access Release and Release.gpg as two separate requests, so the signature would very likely be for a different file than was downloaded.

We decided against putting the Date in the InRelease file only because having InRelease and Release be two different files might cause hard-to-diagnose problems down the road. Date is documented as optional, so the file is still technically correct and the warning can be safely ignored.

[gravufo]

Interesting, thank you very much for the detailed explanation.
I hadn't noticed it was only a warning, so I can definitely ignore that then.

I'll mark this as solved.

Thanks again!

[gravufo]

@ben Turns out I closed too fast. The message is indeed a warning, but I still cannot find the packages on my feed using a apt search command.

Any idea?

Thanks!

[ben]

@gravufo

While investigating a way to add dates to the file, I discovered that the Release file is malformed.

I've filed PG-1596 to fix this, which should be in the next maintenance release.

[gravufo]

@ben Thanks a lot for taking the time to test. Looking forward to the fix :)

[gravufo]

Hey @ben! Any news on when this is getting merged and released?
It's kinda blocking us from using the ProGet debian feed... :(

I see that 2 new maintenance builds were released, but none of them fixes the issue.

Thanks again for your help!

[atripp]

Hi @gravufo sorry on the delay; this fell thru the cracks on prioritization, but it's been merged just now and will be shipped into ProGet 5.2.15, shipping next Friday.

[gravufo]

@atripp Amazing, thank you so much for the fast response! I'll apply the update when it's out and let you know!

[gravufo]

@atripp @ben I can confirm that it works! No more warning when doing apt update and I can successfully search for packages now.

Thanks again!