Re: alternatives DB corruption
On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Michael Neuffer wrote:
> > The database file is corrupted. What did you do to corrupt it? Is there a
> > reliable way to corrupt it?
>
> Yes, by editing it by hand. :-)
So there's no bug in update-alternatives at least.
> I had to do it a few weeks earlier to remove
> some alternatives that were corrupted by a broken package.
> (Things that constantly using unstable can do to you...)
Hum, that should not happen. You should always be able to
update-alternatives to fix stuff.
> I had to edit and fix alternatives manually every now and then over the
> past 15 years or so and never had (major) problems with that. Maybe I was
> just lucky so far.
You won't have to do this in the future, update-alternatives no longer
allows installation of broken alternatives and fixes stuff itself for most
cases.
> > It lacks lots of empty lines at the end. Each alternative should have a
> > set of line like this:
> > <masterfile>
> > <priority>
> > <slave-file-1>
> > <slave-file-2>
> > ...
> > <slave-file-13>
> >
> > Yet your last alternative only has 4 lines:
> > ----
> > /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/ld.so.conf
> > 500
> >
> > /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/x11-extra-modules
> > ----
>
> Yes I removed them. I wasn't aware that they were significant.
*shrug*
> The file format unfortunately isn't documented in the man page.
Because it's not meant to be edited with anything else than
update-alternatives...
> Is there a way to find out how many empty lines are missing where?
I documented the format above... in your specific case you need 15 lines
in total (master + priority + 13 slaves). You already have 4 lines so you
need 11 empty lines after.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
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▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français)
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