dselect package remove failure

[dave@mail.slotter.org (Dave Slotter)]

I'm trying to remove software with dselect and I get the following error:

running dpkg --pending --remove ...
(Reading database ... dpkg: error processing dhttpd (--remove):
 malloc failed (65552 bytes): Cannot allocate memory
dpkg: failed to realloc for variable buffer: Cannot allocate memory

dpkg --remove returned error exit status 2.

The error looks pretty straightforward; it can't allocate memory necessary for
its operation. Now that I look at that amount of memory requested, 65552
is just a little larger than 65535 which is the maximum value for an
unsigned short int. Could this be a boundary limitation? (I tried reading
/usr/include/malloc.h and it's a mess. I find it hard to believe anyone would
find this header file useful.)

However, I believe that I have to take some of the blame for this... I wanted
to have as much software available on my system for other people, so I
installed almost every package that Debian has available. (You can snicker
about the security risks that I have probably caused myself, but I figure that
if people really are that desparate to read my email and want to risk getting
in trouble for something of so little value to others...)

So did I cause dselect to run out of memory because I have so many packages
installed (that the authors of dselect couldn't account for when they wrote
it) or is there something in dhttpd which is causing this to fail?

All help is appreciated.

And thanks to others help on here today, I now know I'm running slink.

-Dave Slotter
 (who is getting his second book on Debian this weekend.)