dpkg parse error
A couple of months ago I got a CD from IConnect, with Debian 1.2. I recently
got around to trying to upgrade (from Debian 1.1), using dselect. When I
tried to Install, I dselect crashed with an error message like:
dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/available'
near line 14530 package `cdda2wav': empty value for version
Now whenever I try to do anything with dselect or dpkg, it gives me this error.
I thought there might be something wrong with the Packages file on the CD, so
I tried the ftp method, directly from ftp.debian.org. The result was the same
(but the package name it complained about had changed -- the one above is
actually this latest error).
How can I fix this? And prevent it from happening again? It's getting me
very depressed -- and conteplating switching to RedHat! Any help would be
appreciated.
Another question in a similar vein: Is there any documentation for dpkg and
dselect, that explains what they actually do, and how all the various files in
in /var/lib/dpkg and /usr/lib/dpkg are used? This mysterious
behind-the-scenes operation is what really irks me about the MSWindows world,
and it pains me to see anything resembling it in Linux. I know I can always
look at the source code, but that's rather different from documentation. For
my current problem, I might be courageous enough to try to fix the
/var/lib/dpkg/available file, if I had some guidance as to how it is used (and
where it came from), and what I could screw up by tinkering with it. At least
I might be able to see where the problem occurred.
David Zelinsky
dsz@alumni.caltech.edu
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