Bug#657389: Tasksel is to blame

[Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org>]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 02:26:54AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > I noticed that as well with today's dailies. This is displayed by 
> > tasksel, installer just invokes it in /target. I can also reproduce it 
> > on an installed system by running 'tasksel -t'.
> 
> Since I can't reproduce this, I can only guess.
> 
> tasksel contains a sub list_installed() that parses
> /var/lib/dpkg/status. Perhaps something about the status file format has
> changed?
> 
> Parsing the file is a bit gratuitous, so I've attached a patch that
> switches it to dpkg-query. Does it fix the issue?

No, that does not help. I investigated a bit and I believe that the 
problem is in getdescriptions() function. In particular, it does the 
following while processing the output of "apt-cache show task-${task}":

                        my ($description)=/^Description-.*: (.*)$/m;
                        ($description)=/^Description: (.*)$/m
                                unless defined $description;

This inadvertently catches the Description-md5 field (which is new, I 
guess?):

# apt-cache show task-desktop | grep Description
Description: Debian desktop environment
Description-md5: 17cb4a1ed6025b48045cc576bf52317c
#

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov                                           jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/                      KeyID: C99E03CC