Re: unable to parse package file; aptitude effectively dead.

[hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 11:49:39AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> > While I'm waiting for someone to *fix* bug 405506, does anyone have an 
> > idea how to recover from it?  Is a reinstall in order?
> > 
> > Yesterday aptitude reported
> >   Unable to parse package file /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates
> > This happened on an etch that was just installed the same day from a 
> > previous-day netinstall daily build.
> > 
> > The file does exist, and appears to be binary gibberish.
> 
> In the bug report, you say:
> 
> | tried startx, got the black screen of death -- completely unresponsive
> | to mouse or keyboard.
> 
> Hard rebooting a wedged system can result in corrupted files in rare
> cases, and it sounds like this is what you have. The pkgstates file is a
> plain text file. The chances of this being an aptitude bug seem very
> near to zero. Unless you or someone else can reproduce the bug (either
> the hang starting X or the file system corruption), it's certianly not
> grave severity.

It is starting to look as if it was a problem with jfs, which, I was 
told, was specifically engineered to prevent this kind of trouble.
Certainly, if it was an aptitude bug, it would have been grave.  But 
since aptitude seems not to blame, I think we should consider it solved 
for aptitude.  Perhaps it should be referred to jfs?  I'll leave the 
decision up to you.  I don't think there are enough specifics that this 
bug would help the jfs maintainers to find the problem, so there may be 
no point.
 
> 
> > There's also a pkgstates.old file, about one minute older, in the same 
> > directory.  Should I try replacing pkgstates by pkgstates.old in the 
> > hope that will help?
> 
> Depends, is it also full of binary garbage? Have you checked the rest of
> your files BTW?

Both of them are binary garbage; it probably won't help.  No idea what's 
happened to the rest of the file system.... Since I only installed it 
yesterday morning, and nothing much had been done with it, perhaps 
reinstalling is the safe thing.

I had used jfs as file system because reports on this mailing list 
indicated that it was more resistant to this kind of thing than either 
ext3 or reiser.  But I've never had problems of this sort with either of 
them, and had problems with jfs the first day I used it, so maybe in 
the reinstall I should go back to reiser of ext3.

Thanks.

-- hendrik

> 
> -- 
> see shy jo