I have experienced this bug and it has resulted in the following consequences on my Kubuntu 12.04 amd64 system:
1. Inability to update or upgrade with apt-get update && apt-get upgrade See example below for error message. 2. Error when trying to install or reinstall any existing package. For instance sudo apt-get install --reinstall update-notifier-common gives --- Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/222 kB of archives. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Use of uninitialized value $item in hash element at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/DbDriver/File.pm line 82, <$__ANONIO__> chunk 29. (Reading database ... 65%dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting: files list file for package 'libhal1' is missing final newline E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) --- For the record, I was told during some upgrade that libhal1 was not needed and could be removed by sudo apt-get autoremove and the above error must have resulted from that operation. 3. The system runs but is flaky. 4. I have a new system disk that is less than three months old and is unlikely to be the cause of the above problems. 5. It appears that I need to re-install my system (sigh). If there is any workaround, I will appreciate knowing about it. Thank.s -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/970139 Title: apt_check.py crashed with SIGSEGV in pkgPolicy::GetCandidateVer() To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/970139/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs