Bug#117719: apt: crashes for no apparent reason

[Ben Burton <benb@acm.org>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.5.4
Severity: important

Hi.  I'm finding apt-get, apt-cache, etc crash for no apparent reason.

root@espresso:/var/lib/dpkg# apt-cache stats
Segmentation fault
root@espresso:/var/lib/dpkg# apt-get dselect-upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Error!
E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/dpkg/status (1)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

A copy of the /var/lib/dpkg/status which generates this problem can be
found at http://people.debian.org/~bab/bugs/status.breaks .

Here's the weird thing.  Take the five lines describing
kernel-image-2.4.13-586 (lines 55710-55714) and move them to the very
bottom of the status file.

Then everything works perfectly.

root@espresso:/var/lib/dpkg# apt-cache stats
Total Package Names : 10322 (413k)
(etc etc)

I've put this up at http://people.debian.org/~bab/bugs/status.good .

I see nothing wrong with the kernel-image-2.4.13-586 lines.  Also,
dpkg --status kernel-image-2.4.13-586 works perfectly with both the bad
and the good status file.

Ben.

-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux espresso 2.4.12-686 #2 Sat Oct 13 20:13:05 EST 2001 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii  libc6                  2.2.4-4           GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 1:2.95.4-0.011006 The GNU stdc++ library