Bug#403985: apt-get update crashes in pkgAcqDiffIndex::ParseDiffIndex

[Tim Small <tim@buttersideup.com>]

I'm seeing similar behaviour, but have a differing backtrace:

Hit http://ftp.sunet.se sarge/main Release
Hit http://www.backports.org sarge-backports/non-free Release
Reading Package Lists... 0%
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0xb7d9e363 in strlen () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
(gdb) bt
#0  0xb7d9e363 in strlen () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#1  0xb7f09df3 in std::string::compare () from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5
#2  0xb7fb77e1 in debPackagesIndex::FindInCache () from 
/usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#3  0xb7f9f13d in pkgCacheGenerator::WriteUniqString () from 
/usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#4  0xb7f9f9ec in pkgMakeStatusCache () from 
/usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#5  0xb7f95e1f in pkgCacheFile::BuildCaches () from 
/usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#6  0x080545fc in ?? ()
#7  0xb7f68f3c in CommandLine::DispatchArg () from 
/usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#8  0x0805d706 in ?? ()
#9  0xb7d3b974 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#10 0x0804c5b1 in ?? ()



In my case, deleting the pkgcache.bin fixed the problem.  I'm using apt 
0.5.28.6 and have saved the offending pkgcache.bin, which I've put here:

http://buttersideup.com/files/bad-pkgcache.bin.bz2

FYI:

zebedee:~/apt-bug# ls -al */pkgcache.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 7047348 Jan  2 17:29 bad/pkgcache.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 7070132 Jan  2 17:48 good/pkgcache.bin

The bad pkgcache.bin was originally timestamped "Dec 19 06:38".  I run 
an apt-get update and upgrade on a cron, and the server ran out of space 
on the filesystem which holds /var/cache/apt the next time it ran around 
24 hours later, but I don't know if this is related or not.

Thanks,

Tim.