Bug#192439: apt: More information about apt problem, possible fix?

[Chirik <chirik@castlefur.com>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.5.5
Followup-For: Bug #192439

  On one of my systems, I started seeing this problem, too, and after not seeing any answers, I looked into it further.  The actual error is being generated by 'apt-cache dumpavail', and if I run it by hand, using strace, and look at the calls, I see that in my case, the last file it tried to read was not one of the downloaded packages, but a package in /var/lib/dpkg/status - the first time, it was trying to read the package record for libgtk1.2 (or libgtk1.2-dev, I don't recall), which turned out to be an old ximian version, so I switch to the debian version.  After doing that, it still failed, this time with libnewt0:

   stat64("/var/lib/dpkg/status", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2107477, ...}) = 0
   open("/var/lib/dpkg/status", O_RDONLY)  = 3
   fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)         = 0
   lseek(3, 1712253, SEEK_SET)             = 1712253
   read(3, "Package: libnewt0\nStatus: ...", 742) = 742
   close(3)                                = 0
   brk(0)                                  = 0x807e000
   brk(0)                                  = 0x807e000
   brk(0x805c000)                          = 0x805c000
   brk(0)                                  = 0x805c000
   munmap(0x40749000, 208896)              = 0
   munmap(0x40287000, 4987447)             = 0
   write(2, "E", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, ":", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, " ", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, "I", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, "n", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, "t", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, "e", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, "r", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, "n", 1)                        = 1
   write(2, "a", 1)                        = 1
   
   And we can see the beginning of the error message being printed out.  Since I didn't need libnewt0 anymore,  went ahead and did dpkg --purge libnewt0, and then dselect update, and this time, I had no problems with it. (I am still having problems with it bailing if a Package file has one blank line, which is happening on my local package repository right now - I haven't looked into that much, yet - this only fixes the trouble parsing issue, for me)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux raccoon 2.4.20 #1 SMP Fri Dec 20 11:33:48 PST 2002 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii  libc6                        2.3.1-17    GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgcc1                      1:3.3-0pre9 GCC support library
ii  libstdc++5                   1:3.3-0pre9 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3

-- no debconf information