Afaict dpkg has no mechanism in place for detecting or recovering from database curruption. The format of the datbase means that curruption tends to lead to dpkg forgetting a number of packages exist and thinking one package has a veryI suspect this mean that 0.25% (1 of 400) of the machines reporting to popcon.debian.org got a corrupt/inconsitent dpkg database.
long description. Next time the user uses apt it will complain about broken packages and advise the user to use apt-get -f install. Apt will then reinstall forgotten packages that other packages depend on but if nothing depends on the package it will be left present on the system but not in the dpkg database.