Bug#2546: dpkg inappropriately marks packages as installed

[Raul Miller <rdm@tad.micro.umn.edu>]

Ian Jackson:
 > Perhaps you made a mistake while doing a recursive chmod ?

No, that would have left everything in /usr/bin unusable, with an
emphasis on older binaries.  What I'm seeing here is that newer
binaries have the wrong permissions on them.

However, I'm seeing some other strange behaviors with my machine.  How
about we hold off on this for a while, to give me a chance to figure
out what's going on.  Depending on what I find, I may choose to
believe that these problems are some strange artifact the way my
machine is configured.

Since I don't have a clue if this is related or not, I might as well
include a description of what I'm seeing here.

At present, my system tends to hang during boot.  At the moment, it's
up, but I can't log in as root or su to root.  I've hacked up one of
my rc2.d scripts to start a shell on tty8 -- that works fine.  Here's
the tail end of an strace of su:

open("/dev", O_RDONLY)                  = 3
fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)           = 0
getdents(3, [total 54 dents], 4096)     = 992
...
getdents(3, [total 43 dents], 4096)     = 696
getdents(3, [total 0 dents], 4096)      = 0
close(3)                                = 0
SYS_148(0x1, 0x1, 0, 0x4007875d, 0x1)   = 3
socket_subcall(0x3, 0x4009c12c, 0xa, 0x400787b7, 0x3, 0x4009c12c, 0xa, 0x40089c64) = ? ERESTARTSYS (To be restarted)

[it hung in that "socket_subcall", and this is where it left off when
I killed it.  This lockup is pretty consistent, and occurs in other
excutables such as login.]

Earlier this evening, it didn't matter what kernel version I was
running (1.2.8 .. 1.2.73).  I haven't tested this exact configuration
with ealier kernel versions than 1.2.70.  First, I'm going to see if I
can find anything about those syscalls...

--
Raul