Re: dist-upgrade - potato -> testing problem

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Tom Vier wrote:
> (please cc replies to me, i'm not on this list)
> 
> i decided to give testing a try, but ran into a bit of a problem:
> 
> Template parse error near "" at /usr/lib/perl5/Debian/DebConf/Template.pm line 102, <TEMPLATES> chunk 2.
> E: Sub-process /usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt returned an error code (29)
> E: Failure running script /usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt

This is a combination of a bug in the debconf in potato, which is not
very robust in its parsing of some files, and a buggy package that has a
malformed templates file with a doubled blank line in it (probably),
and which breaks the old debconf.

We need to find out what package that is, so it can be fixed.
Unfortunatly, that old debconf does not bother to say. Please do *not*
upgrade debconf, or anything else for now, until we figure out what
package is broken.

Could you please do the following for me:

1. Edit /usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure, and go to line 99, which reads:

foreach my $x (0..$#debs) {

2. Add a new line after that, which reads:

print STDERR "DEBUG: $debs[$x]\n";

3. Reproduce the problem again, this time you should get some debug info
   as it processes each .deb in turn. When it fails, the last .deb it
   output is the broken one, probably. Send me the output and I can
   probably take it from there.

> this happens on alpha and x86.

Please do the above on both systems, you may be hitting different
packages on each.

-- 
see shy jo