Comment 6 for bug 1033838

I have noticed this issue, too, on three different machines, all running 12.04.1 LTS. Two of them are Kubuntu desktops installed by me, one other is an Ubuntu Server installed by my service provider.

Actually, /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00aptitude is not the only surprising file, there is also /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00trustcdrom.

I am positive I have not created the files. I have been unable to find which program could have created them. I have grepped the whole hard drive of the machines, and also the source code for aptitude-0.6.8.2, apt-0.8.10.3+squeeze1, muon-1.3.1, to no avail.

I have noticed two interesting things. On the machines I control, those two files have most likely been generated locally, and not extracted from an archive. Here's a listing of one of my apt.conf.d directories showing why I think that:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 49 2012-11-01 21:04:10.927496746 +0100 00aptitude
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40 2012-11-01 21:01:19.758647967 +0100 00trustcdrom
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 430 2012-04-20 12:21:55.000000000 +0200 01autoremove
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 157 2012-03-30 19:18:30.000000000 +0200 05aptitude
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 129 2011-08-22 13:58:02.000000000 +0200 10periodic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 108 2011-08-22 13:58:02.000000000 +0200 15update-stamp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 85 2011-08-22 13:58:02.000000000 +0200 20archive
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 123 2012-04-20 12:21:55.000000000 +0200 20changelog
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2124 2012-03-12 10:03:53.000000000 +0100 50unattended-upgrades
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 182 2012-03-15 14:21:13.000000000 +0100 70debconf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 231 2011-08-22 13:58:02.000000000 +0200 99update-notifier

As you can see, the first two files are the only one to have sub-second timestamps. Generally, it seems to me extracted files have no sub-second timestamps, in contrast to files generated locally.

The other interesting thing is, thanks to /var/log/aptitude*, /var/log/dpkg*, /var/log/history.log* and /var/log/term.log*, I can say with some confidence that:

- These files were not created during the initial install of the machine;
- These files were created a couple of minutes before the first round of install/updates done by the package manager (on one of the machines, *months* passed between the initial install and the first round of updates, so I am sure they were created right before the updates);
- I had not installed Aptitude at the time these files were created;
- I was most likely using the package manager available in KDE when those files were created (Muon I believe).

So, I believe these files were somehow created by Muon, maybe indirectly.