Bug#156565: re : Re: Bug#156565: dpkg: strange corruption of available file

[Florent Rougon <florent.rougon@free.fr>]

Hi,

I don't know if it can help, but I encountered a similar problem on a
woody box about 2 weeks ago.

Note: the box ran testing before woody's release and I temporarily used
unstable in my sources.list when there were security issues to get the
fixed packages so it may have pulled some packages from unstable (but
clearly not a recent dpkg, since it has 1.9.21).

What is similar at first sight:
  - corrupt available file
  - problem disappeared after the first "dselect update"

What is different at first sight:
  - not bleeding edge dpkg (apt may be worth looking at too)
  - no ^H or ^W characters like in Yann's mail

You can find the corrupt available file at:

  <URL:http://www.via.ecp.fr/~flo/tmp/valahaad_dpkg_available.corrupt.bz2>

The first (and perhaps only) problem is located at the first occurrence
of "Package: kernel-image-2.2.20", whose Version, Source and Description
fields, at least, have been screwed up (they are found in the next
record, which has no Package field). (The package was built with
make-kpkg and installed months ago, causing no particular problem).
Also, it has

  Architecture: -libc6.2-3-2-3.2, libart2 (>= 1.2.13-5)[and many others]"

which is not great. ;-)

HTH,

-- 
Florent