apt-get hanging

[John Lapeyre <lapeyre@physics.arizona.edu>]

apt 0.3.11 for i386 compiled on Jun 28 1999  21:59:55

It uses 100% CPU and hangs after printing:
homey 63 > apt-get  -f dist-upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Correcting dependencies...    

strace shows the only system call in the infinite loop is this
gettimeofday({933282300, 189775}, NULL) = 0 

I am trying to do a dist-upgrade, and have had to run
apt-get many times. It worked OK several times, but eventually
the bug above appeared.
   I had to run it several times, because there are a dozen
or more packages with broken installation scripts.  In 
particular there seems to be a problem with several packages 
with  update-menus hanging,
and after aborting, it leaves the package in a state in which
it can neither be installed, nor removed.   There are also
many packages with overwrite problems.
   In short.  If you are doing a big upgrade to unstable,
be prepared for a bunch of problems !

-- 
John Lapeyre <lapeyre@physics.arizona.edu>,  lapeyre@debian.org
Tucson,AZ     http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~lapeyre