Sorry Maintainer (Eric?), PEBKAC, please delete this bug if possible. The problem was messed up permissions, I'd had to move my approx cache directory from my / root partition because it just keeps getting bigger since it no longer seems to cull itself and approx-gc no longer works. It is now close to 150 GB. So I moved the approx cache to my data partition instead, where it had room to grow.
$cache /data/approx But recently I had problem writing to some directory on my server's data partition, so I did a recursive chown to my normal user to the partition to fix the problem, but I'd forgot I'd done it a few days later when I tried to update a machine on my little network. But after letting it percolate in my head for a few hours I remembered what I had done and that my approx cache was on that partition, so I did a 'chown -R 125.131 /data/approx' and all is good again. Some people are too dumb to run Linux. While I'm groveling and thanking you for all your do, is there any new way to cull the cruft from my approx cache? For example, right now I have 23 versions of google-chrome-stable in my /server/approx/googlechrome/pool/main/g/google-chrome-stable/' directory. Maybe a command to delete all the .deb files in the cache that are older than a year old? Stay safe & well.
