remove the Section member from package struct

A version belongs to a section and has hence a section member of its
own. A package on the other hand can have multiple versions from
different sections. This was "solved" by using the section which was
parsed first as order of sources.list defines, but that is obviously a
horribly unpredictable thing.

We therefore directly remove this struct member to free some space and
mark the access method as deprecated, which is told to return the
section of the 'newest' known version, which is at least predictable,
but possible not what it returned before – but nobody knows.

Users are way better of with the Section() as returned by the version
they are dealing with. It is likely the same for all versions of a
package, but in the few cases it isn't, it is important (like packages
moving from main/* to contrib/* or into oldlibs …).

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/apt-pkg/cacheiterators.h b/apt-pkg/cacheiterators.h
index 2fdf8404d..f2aae7272 100644
--- a/apt-pkg/cacheiterators.h
+++ b/apt-pkg/cacheiterators.h
@@ -160,7 +160,11 @@ class pkgCache::PkgIterator: public Iterator<Package, PkgIterator> {
 
 	// Accessors
 	inline const char *Name() const {return S->Name == 0?0:Owner->StrP + S->Name;}
-	inline const char *Section() const {return S->Section == 0?0:Owner->StrP + S->Section;}
+	// Versions have sections - and packages can have different versions with different sections
+	// so this interface is broken by design. It used to return the section of the "first parsed
+	// package stanza", but as this can potentially be anything it now returns the section of the
+	// newest version instead (if any). aka: Run as fast as you can to Version.Section().
+	APT_DEPRECATED const char *Section() const;
 	inline bool Purge() const {return S->CurrentState == pkgCache::State::Purge ||
 		(S->CurrentVer == 0 && S->CurrentState == pkgCache::State::NotInstalled);}
 	inline const char *Arch() const {return S->Arch == 0?0:Owner->StrP + S->Arch;}