PPA info with trailing quote in /etc/apt/sources.list

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1456479

Thanks for the report! Unfortunately reporting it against apt is incorrect as apt itself contains no program which "automatically" adds PPAs or similar such. It just takes the sources.list content and interprets it. So it was either you adding this PPA by hand in which case its a user error (copy&paste maybe?) OR it was a tool (potentially in the apt-* namespace, but not maintained by the apt team) which has this bug.

Its a bit unlikely perhaps, but as far as apt is concerned main" could be a valid component (also, because it is hardly defined which characters could be) and the error messages it prints tell you that it tried to get data for the main" component as it was configured to do, but wasn't able to.

Hi David,

I'm looking more into this issue. I will check carefully versus 14.04.2 LTS.

The PPA of mkusb has the same code for all versions (it contains only bash scripts and configuration files) and the versions 'have always been' simply copied with the copying tool of Launchpad. There is no manual editing, that could have added the quote character.

One possibility is that the copying process of Launchpad could have gone wrong (maybe a temporary error).

How is the data from the command

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/unstable

transferred to the file /etc/apt/sources.list ? The answer to that question might help solve this problem.

When I try again right now, it seems not to work at all with add-apt-repository and apt-get update. Synaptic did the work but the trailing quote was added.

Could it be that Launchpad is not yet ready to manage PPAs for Wily?

Things worked as they should in Lubuntu Trusty (14.04.2 LTS). So I went back to Lubuntu Wily.

The bug appeared in a Wily system, which was updated/upgraded from an iso file that was a couple of days old. I zsynced and flashed the current iso file (Lubuntu Wily desktop i386) and tried again. This time it worked from

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/unstable

There is a correct entry in

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/mkusb-ubuntu-unstable-wily.list

and it was possible to install and run the relevant software (mkusb).

I am not sure what happened, if I did something wrong and can't remember it, or if there was an error of this pre-alpha Wily system, some temporary error at Launchpad or in the data transfer via the internet. Anyway, it works now, so we can close the bug report :-)