Re: dselect problem

[Anthony Fox <ant@lonelyroad.org>]

As a followup to my last email, I believe the problem is in the way
the version number of the package blt-dev is written in the depends of
many other packages.  In /var/cache/apt/available, the Depends: lines
that contain blt-dev always list the version number as "2.4[ij]-1 ".
dpkg is barfing on the trailing space.  I traced the problem to a
while loop in parsehelp.c in the parseversion() method of the dpkg
source.  the loop quits on the first space, and then checks the
pointer to see if it is valid.  if it is, it assumes that it is a
character in which case the space it quit on is an embedded space.
however, in this case, it is not an embedded space, rather a trailing
space.  i don't know whether this is a bug in dpkg or whether version
numbers are supposed to not have trailing spaces.  regardless,
bugs.debian.org is down.  Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Anthony