I seem to have messed up aptitude. Can't get back original behavior.

["A. F. Cano" <afc@shibaya.lonestar.org>]

Hello,

I mistyped a command.  I intended to type "dpkg -S gdb" to find what package
contains the debugger in question and instead I typed "aptitude -S gdb"
>From then on, aptitude starts but claims I only have 44 packages installed,
and a few more in the other categories.  Is this a matter of just the display
or is it that now aptitude only knows about a very small subset of packages?

How do I return aptitude to the original behavior?

Of course I immediately checked man aptitude to see what I had done:

  -S <fname>
      Loads the extended state information from <fname> instead of the
      standard state file.

Since I presume file "gdb" (in the context of aptitude) doesn't exist I'm
not quite sure what happened here.  Help!

>From the manual page I gather that the default package state file is
/var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates, so I ran

aptitude -S /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates

but this made no difference in returning aptitude to the previous behavior.

I had searched (inside aptitude) for gdb, but all I got were a few matches
of some libs that contain "gdb" in their names.  Thus the attempt to search
with the mistaken command.  Now I'm not sure if I can't find the gdb
program because aptitude is damaged somehow or because it is not in the
lenny distribution.  I have used "dpkg -S /usr/bin/gdb" and
"dpkg -S /bin/gdb" so it appears that whatever package contains gdb is
not installed, searches for "gdb" and "-dev" inside aptitude didn't turn
out anything obvious.

Why did I go looking for gdb?  Kaffeine crashed, and when told to give
me a backtrace, complained that gdb wasn't found.

# apt-cache search gdb
courier-authlib-userdb - userdb support for the Courier authentication library
libgdbm3 - GNU dbm database routines (runtime version)
python-dbg - Debug Build of the Python Interpreter (version 2.5)
ruby1.8 - Interpreter of object-oriented scripting language Ruby 1.8
vim-dbg - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor (debugging symbols)

This too failed to find gdb.  Where is it? Do I have a totally damaged
package database now?

This is a freshly installed Lenny (not an upgrade).  What has happened?

Any hints will be welcome.  Thanks.

A.