[RESOLVED] Today's update breaks wine i386

[GreyGeek]

4-24-2023: Released the holds on my wine-stable applications and did an "apt full-upgrade". Winehq came through and my i386 apps now run beautifully.


I need wine-stable-386 so that I can use the EKG program that monitors my wife's heart condition. No problem, I thought, because I have all the wine packages from winehq pinned so they won't be yanked. Wrong. The pinning was ignored and I lost my wine i386 ability.

I rolled back to last night's BTRFS snapshot and explored the pinning failure. I tried using muon to re-pin them but found that muon wouldn't let me pin wine-stable-i386. I dropped to the console and tried both dpkg --set-selections and apt-mark, but neither allowed me to pin wine-stable-i386, so I created that file manually.

To test the pinning I did:
apt-get install wine-stable-i386 --simulate

I found that

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
wine-stable : Depends: wine-stable-i386 (= 8.0.0.0~focal-1)
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

So I decided to try upgrading the non-wine packages one package at a time. The first one to try was apt:
apt upgrade apt

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
... delete ubuntu ad ...
The following packages have been kept back:
wine-stable wine-stable-amd64 wine-stable-i386:i386 winehq-stable
The following packages will be upgraded:
apt apt-utils libapt-pkg6.0 ubuntu-advantage-tools
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 2,667 kB of archives.
After this operation, 16.4 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates/main amd64 libapt-pkg6.0 amd64 2.4.9 [906 kB]
Get:2 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates/main amd64 apt amd64 2.4.9 [1,379 kB]
Get:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates/main amd64 apt-utils amd64 2.4.9 [211 kB]
Get:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates/main amd64 ubuntu-advantage-tools amd64 27.14.4~22.04 [171 kB]
Fetched 2,667 kB in 1s (2,409 kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 285593 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libapt-pkg6.0_2.4.9_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libapt-pkg6.0:amd64 (2.4.9) over (2.4.8) ...
Setting up libapt-pkg6.0:amd64 (2.4.9) ...
(Reading database ... 285593 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../archives/apt_2.4.9_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking apt (2.4.9) over (2.4.8) ...
Setting up apt (2.4.9) ...
(Reading database ... 285593 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../apt-utils_2.4.9_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking apt-utils (2.4.9) over (2.4.8) ...
Preparing to unpack .../ubuntu-advantage-tools_27.14.4~22.04_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking ubuntu-advantage-tools (27.14.4~22.04) over (27.13.6~22.04.1) ...
Setting up apt-utils (2.4.9) ...
Setting up ubuntu-advantage-tools (27.14.4~22.04) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/ubuntu-advantage/uaclient.conf ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/update-motd.d/91-contract-ua-esm-status ...
Removing obsolete conffile /etc/update-motd.d/88-esm-announce ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.10.2-1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.35-0ubuntu3.1) ...
root@jerry-HP-Laptop-17-cn1xxx:/#

Surprisingly, upgrading apt resulted in upgrading the other non-wine packages, as if pinning actually worked.

However, if a future upgrade consists of dozens of packages upgrading each one manually would be a pain, IF upgrading one didn't result in upgrading the other non-wine apps. I could, of course, simply not do any more updates but that would mean I would be stuck with currently buggy apps and miss out on future security patches. Maybe winehq will have a fix soon?

I returned to Kubuntu from an 18 month stint with Neon because of this wine-i386 problem. At the time Jonathan Riddell said he wasn't going to fix it but later, after I returned to Kubuntu, he relented and modified the libpoppler library to fix the problem on Neon. (Obviously my leaving had no bearing on his decision)

Here's hoping to a speedy fix from winehq.