Please elevate the importance of this bug report! An average user would have no clue what to do in this situation, and so apt/synaptic/etc. should properly detect and catch the problem to avoid a segfault and suggest to the user what to do, if not offer the option to automatically delete and rebuild the cache files.
In my case, I experienced this problem seemingly out of the blue. After some investigation, I downloaded and installed the libc6-dbg manually with dpkg, in order to get a proper backtrace. It appears, however, that the mere act of installing the -dbg package solved the problem! I don't understand it. I even made a backup of the offending *pkgcache.bin files, and even after removing libc6-dbg and replacing the original cache files, I still can't reproduce the problem. Perhaps the segfault wasn't even related to the pkgcache.bin files, but this seemed the most likely scenario. Unfortunately, all I could get of it while it was happening was an strace and this mostly useless backtrace: # gdb --args /usr/bin/apt-get -- install audacity GNU gdb 6.8-debian This GDB was configured as "x86_64-linux-gnu"... (no debugging symbols found) (gdb) r Starting program: /usr/bin/apt-get -- install audacity (no debugging symbols found) Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x00007fe2f313aae0 in strcmp () from /lib/libc.so.6 (gdb) bt #0 0x00007fe2f313aae0 in strcmp () from /lib/libc.so.6 #1 0x00007fe2f30f43f4 in ?? () from /lib/libc.so.6 #2-15 same as above with random addresses #16 0x00007fe2f30f4771 in qsort () from /lib/libc.so.6 #17 0x00000000004067e6 in ?? () #18 0x0000000000418e60 in ?? () #19 0x00007fe2f3ded6ca in CommandLine::DispatchArg () from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.7-6.so.4.6 #20 0x000000000040855b in ?? () #21 0x00007fe2f30de1c4 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/libc.so.6 #22 0x0000000000406539 in ?? () #23 0x00007ffffc2a8a58 in ?? () #24 0x0000000000000000 in ?? () I will work on trying to reproduce this problem, but no luck so far. ** Attachment added: "strace of apt-get segfault" http://launchpadlibrarian.net/15678491/apt-bt.txt -- apt segfaults if /var/cache/apt/srcpkgcache.bin is wrong https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/57393 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
