Bug#401263: Problem is not solved

["Gordon Farquharson" <gordonfarquharson@gmail.com>]

This problem is not solved because it causes the Debian Installer to
fail on a NSLU2. In practice, one can manually delete the *.bin files
in /var/cache/apt/ during an install (I haven't tried to see if it
fixes the problem), but I expect that this procedure is not the user
friendly installation experience that the Debian Installer team is
looking for :-)

The problem does seem to lie either with the cache files or with files
in /var/lib/dpkg, although I suspect that it is the former.  Attached
is a diff of /var/lib/dpkg before and after I manually install a deb
using dpkg (gdb in this case). Everything in the diff looks ok to me.

The only other changes in /var/lib/apt and /var/cache/apt occurs in
the package cache files. Specifically, before I manually install a deb
with dpkg:

-rw-r--r-- 1 gordon gordon 6422636 2006-12-01 17:17 pkgcache.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 gordon gordon 6422586 2006-12-01 17:17 srcpkgcache.bin

and after I manually install a deb with dpkg:

-rw-r--r-- 1 gordon gordon 6422686 2006-12-03 14:49 pkgcache.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 gordon gordon 6422586 2006-12-01 17:17 srcpkgcache.bin

The size of pkgcache.bin changes. So it looks like there is a
corruption of some sort in the package cache files. I can send these
files if somebody wants to have a look at them.

For now, I'm going to try the installation again, and when the problem
occurs, I'm going to save the pkgcache.bin file, fix it by manually
installing a deb, and then replace the new pkgcache.bin file with the
old one to see if the problem returns.

Gordon

--
Gordon Farquharson