Bug#85799: "apt-cache search" allocates all available memory
Package: apt
Version: 0.4.8
Severity: important
Executing 'apt-cache search <regex>' (the search regex doesn't seem to matter)
displays some results, but allocates all memory before completing. Needless to
say, this used to work (yesterday, in fact). This happens even when I remove
all sources from sources.list, so it appears to be triggered by my status file
(available from http://people.debian.org/~mdz/temp/status). An strace is
available at http://people.debian.org/~mdz/temp/apt-cache.strace. Here is a
sample run with all sources uncommented:
mizar:[~] apt-cache search nls
gcombust - GTK+ based CD mastering and burning program
Segmentation fault
and one with all of them commented out:
mizar:[~] apt-cache search nls
motifnls - Files needed to run some Motif applications.
Segmentation fault
(I ran these with lowered resource limits to avoid bringing my system to its
knees)
It is worth noting that 'apt-cache dump' and 'apt-cache dumpavail' both seem to
work fine (as do apt-get install and apt-get remove, assuming I uncomment the
entries in sources.list).
I don't have a copy of my status file from yesterday, unfortunately; my
status-old is from today and still exhibits the problem. A libc6 upgrade also
happened in between, so it is possible that a change there triggered this, but
I haven't had any problems with other programs as yet.
I'll look into this some and send some more information.
-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux mizar 2.4.0 #1 Sat Jan 6 09:34:06 EST 2001 i686
Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii libc6 2.2.1-2 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libstdc++2.10 1:2.95.2-14 The GNU stdc++ library
--
- mdz
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