Bug#944968: popularity-contest: Program accesses internal dpkg database

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Sat, 2020-12-12 at 15:33:47 +0100, Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 08:55:00PM +0000, Niels Thykier wrote:
> > While it would take a bit of restructuring / refactoring, I think it
> > would be possible to use a single dpkg-query for everything and still be
> > able to process the data in a "streaming" fashion.
> > 
> > As an example, using the following:
> > 
> >   dpkg-query --show \
> >     --showformat='${status} ${package}\n${db-fsys:Files}\n\n'

> I am trying to implement this to see how well this perform.
> Unfortunately it seems it does not provide a stable interface across release,
> but maybe I am doing something wrong.
> 
> dpkg-query --show --showformat='${status} ${package}\n${db-fsys:Files}\n\n'|head -n1
> 
> On buster:
> deinstall ok config-files 0ad
> 
> On sid:
> (Lecture de la base de données... 134812 fichiers et répertoires déjà
> installés.)

For others following along at home (and myself), this was filed as #977240,
and fixed in dpkg 1.20.6. (Was asked about a missing reply here, which I
though I was owing after fixing it, then found about the bug. :)

Thanks,
Guillem