Hi Florian,
Thank you very, very much for your
quick,
clear,
generous and
smart
email.
All are fine qualities!
I
am happy to report you helped me stop debsecan
from crashing with
root$ aptitude purge libharfbuzz0a xmovie
think my /var/lib/dpkg/status file had
non-utf-8 data because my computer still had
configuration files for obsolete removed
packages,
found them with
$ grep -B 10 -axv '.*' /var/lib/dpkg/status
learned they're obsolete with
$ apt-cache policy libharfbuzz0a:i386 xmovie
and revealled their configuration files with
$ dpkg -l libharfbuzz0a xmovie
I wonder if line 137 in __iter__ of
/usr/bin/debsecan could have a nice python "try
block" added around it to
check for errors,
report which package in /var/lib/dpkg/status
crashed it and
make the important package debsecan more
resilient.
Thanks again Florian.
Your help was cool.
Kind regards,
Kingsley
On 06/28/2025 10:27, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Kingsley G. Morse, Jr.:
>
> > I happened to notice it crashes when a package's
> > Maintainer field in /var/lib/dpkg/status contains
> > non-Latin characters.
>
> The control file of the package has valid UTF-8, so something must
> have happened to your version to /var/lib/dpkg/status.
>
> Do you have anything on your system that depends on libharfbuzz0a?
> Maybe you can just deinstall the package.
--
Time is the fire in which we all burn.
