Bug#376777: apt-utils: apt-ftparchive fails to generate Contents files

[James Troup <james@nocrew.org>]

Package: apt-utils
Version: 0.6.44.2
Severity: serious
Tags: help

(Backported) apt-ftparchive on ftp-master currently fails to generate
Contents files.  I've reproduced this locally on sid with vanilla
apt-utils and a trivial apt.conf file.

| Done Packages, Starting contents.
|  unstable/Contents-i386:
| E: Sub-process decompressor exited unexpectedly
| E: Error processing contents unstable/Contents-i386
| Done. 588MB in 335 archives. Took 1m49s

Michael's looked into this today but was unable to find the problem
and unfortunately he's now away for a while.  (Thus the 'help' tag)

strace shows that one of the gzip -d processes is throwing SIGPIPE but
nothing else particularly useful.  I've put one up at
http://people.debian.org/~troup/misc/strace.txt anyway.

Interestingly while trying to reproduce this I discovered that if I
limited the number of debs I was feeding apt-ftparchive, I could make
the problem go away.  63 or less files worked, >= 64 doesn't.

I've attached the local apt.conf too (but it's obviously not useful
unmodified).

-- 
James

Dir
{
   ArchiveDir "/home/james/scratch/apt/";
   OverrideDir "/home/james/scratch/apt/";
   CacheDir "/home/james/scratch/apt/";
};

Default
{
   Packages::Compress "gzip";
   Contents::Compress "gzip";
}

tree "unstable"
{
   FileList "/home/james/scratch/apt/filelist";
   Sections "main";
   Architectures "i386";
   BinOverride "override";
};