Bug#46310: dpkg robustness issue

[Chris Ricker <chris.ricker@genetics.utah.edu>]

Package: dpkg
Version: 1.4.1.11

Recently, a couple of packages in which the "Priority:  Optional" field had
been miss-spelled "Priority:  Optionnal" were added to potato.  This caused
apt and dselect all sorts of confusion.  Running your choice of either
apt-get update or dselect and then choosing update resulted in errors like:

  Reading Package Lists... Error!
  E: Malformed Priority line
  E: Error occured while processing aleph-doc (NewVersion1)
  E: Problem with MergeList
/var/state/apt/lists/http.us.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_main_binary-i386_Packages
  E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

for all the packages with the miss-spelling.

The short-term solution, obviously, is to fix the miss-spelling, and that's
been done, but, long-term, it might be worth making the whole system more
tolerant of miss-spellings, especially given the number of Debian
developers and the myriad of mother tongues of those developers....

later,
chris

-- 
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom@gatech.edu
                                              chris.ricker@genetics.utah.edu