Re: apt-get not working anymore
[ adding back in debian-user and quoting everything ... ]
Klaus Ethgen wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> Am Di den 1. Sep 2009 um 21:16 schrieb David Claughton:
>> > maybe that is an issue for debian-user, so I put it in the To too
>> > although I am not subscribed there.
>
>> Yes it is ... removing -devel and cc-ing you since you aren't subscribed.
>
> Hm. Well, I though that debian-user is correct spelling. However...
It is! I removed the debian-devel list since I didn't think it was an
issue for that list. I kept debian-user as it was more appropriate.
>
>> > When I run any apt-get command I get the error:
>> > E: Wow, you exceeded the number of versions this APT is capable of.
>> > E: Problem with MergeList
/var/lib/apt/lists/debian.ethz.ch_mirror_debian_dists_experimental_main_binary-i386_Packages
>> > E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
>> >
>
>> I had a look at this bug, from what I can tell you're correct in that it
>> has nothing to do with translations as such.
>
> Well, yes and no, there was a translation bug which looked same. But
> this seems to be fixed. (Well, it is the same source of static lists...)
>
>> It seems to be a problem with having too many entries in
>> /etc/apt/sources.list such that the total number of packages indexed is
>> greater than 65,536.
>
> That's correct. That is easy to perform. The list of packages in debian
> is growing day by day. If you have different distributions in that list
> (configured by the preferences to pin the versions) this is easy to
> fill.
>
>> What do you have in your sources.list? Can you try commenting some of
>> them out? (Don't forget to do a 'apt-get update' if you do that).
>
> Uh, I know how to, well, work around the bug for a wile. Sorry, if I
> didn't made this clear enough. The problem is that there might be other
> users out there having the same problem and sticking to a system which
> cannot be updated. That was the reason I wrote to debian-devel. apt is
> such a essential part that such a case can render many systems broken
> very fast.
>
>> Are you using Lenny? The bug appears to have been fixed in the versions
>> of apt in testing and sid so if you're not using Lenny (or maybe you are
>> using a hybrid system and that's why you have so many entries in
>> sources.list?), then you could try a more up-to-date version of apt.
>
> Well, that an other work around. Unfortunately there is some dependency
> problem (libapt-pkg-perl is the source) that other important packages
> gets deinstalled. So, yes, this might be a solution but not for all
> people.
>
> However, back to the bug itself. The bug is known now for long time. It
> was known before lenny was released. My question is addressing that
> behaviour. Why isn't it fixed in stable if a fix is available? It is no
> help for the majority of the users out there if it is fixed in unstable
> or experimental or even testing (Well testing is not that old and it is
> in a worse state than unstable at the moment).
>
> So summering the mail I think that this is a very urgent bug. It is a
> ticking time bomb!
Well, I'm not the maintainer so I can't say if there is any plan to
backport this fix to Lenny.
However given that the problem would seem likely to only affect
(relatively few) people running hybrid systems which AFAIK aren't
officially supported, I think it is unlikely to qualify for a stable
update IMHO.
>
> Regards
> Klaus
>
> Ps. Please excuse my bad English. I am sure that some sentences are not
> well formed but I do not know how to say it better. :-)
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