Re: wishlist for dpkg
On 17 May 2001, Brian May wrote:
> >>>>> "Wichert" == Wichert Akkerman <wichert@cistron.nl> writes:
>
> Wichert> There are actually 2 things that protect you here: apt
> Wichert> checks the MD5 checksum when it downloads the package,
> Wichert> and if it is corrupt gzip won't be able to unpack the
> Wichert> file anyway. Something really strange has to happen if it
> Wichert> gets corrupted after it is unzipped..
>
> Yes. Thats what I thought (a pity I don't have the exact error from
> dpkg anymore; at the time I was more concerned with fixing my broken
> system). However, from bug #84243 is seems like I wasn't the only one
> affected. Not only that, but it is from libc6, too. Is that a
> coincidence or what?
The coincidence is, that libc6 may destroy the system completely and thus
deserves much attention ;-)
The trouble I had, was that the deb was correctly downloaded (by apt-get),
but when I copied it to another system by storing it first on a CDROM,
it got corrupted somehow.
I had not seen any error message by dpkg, but the maintainer scripts
did not work, and neither did ls, chmod or something else.
It turned out, that data.tar.gz was unzipped, but not completely because
of corruption. A tar/gz error was shown with dpkg --contents (I think
a broken pipe).
Hence, all symlinks in libc6 where missing when dpkg -i unpacked the .deb.
It was a hard time to create these ;-)
Please see
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0101/msg02793.html
for more details.
BTW, if I use dpkg-scanpackages to build my own Packages file from a
partial, local archive and try to update with apt-get - would it notice
any such corrupted .deb? I don't think so.
Ulf
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