On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, Julian Gilbey wrote: > I have also been experiencing this problem sporadically when using > aptitude, but it seems that the culprit is dpkg itself. Somehow, dpkg > seems to sometimes mess up the formatting of the available file when > rewriting it. I don't know when or why this happens, but next time I > will keep a copy. > > Also, yesterday, during the large stable -> testing upgrade, dpkg > managed to make the same error with its status file: it lost the > beginning of a package section, right up to and including "Depends: " > and began the section with the first dependency. The only way to fix > it was to manually edit the status file. > > This seems like quite a serious problem!
If it's a dpkg bug, indeed. But until someone finds a way to reproduce the problem, it's easy to assume that it could be file-system related or some other weirdness. It doesn't happen that often otherwise we would be overwhelmed with similar reports, and we aren't. dpkg is checking all system calls and if something has gone wrong during a write or similar, you should have some related error before the parse error. Such an error would be interesting to see. There's a logic of transactional update already in place, so in theory the database should never get corrupt… Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
