Bug#657085: Please increase the size of APT::Cache-Limit. Current value: 25165824. -- but ignores setting

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

David Kalnischkies wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 04:49, Daniel Hartwig <mandyke@gmail.com> wrote:

>> As a temporary fix, you can try setting APT::Cache-Fallback "true"
>
> mhh. Jonathan (cc'ed) claims in his mail to control that this workaround works.

After further experimentation, I think you're right that it doesn't.
APT::Cache-Fallback seems to just change the error message.

With APT::Cache-Fallback, instead of the original message, after
sending out that email I got a message about realloc() being called
with an invalid pointer.  It was reproducible.

As a workaround, I limited the number of sources.list lines to
something small.  Then I was able to install dselect and use its FTP
method to move on with work.  Unfortunately, for some reason, I can't
reproduce the original problem any more --- maybe the APT cache was
populated or the state of the "available" file is involved somehow.

[...]
> Is the system low on memory maybe? Getting more than 25 MB of consecutive
> memory might be harder than it sounds sometimes. For me at least the effect
> of the setting above sounds like a placebo.

The system has 600 MiB or so of memory, 500 of that RAM, most of it
usually free.  This was in a new installation of Debian 6.0.3 on
kfreebsd-i386.  The first thing I did after logging into the new
system was to add sid and experimental to sources.list and "apt-get
update", which triggered the "Please increase the size of
APT::Cache-Limit. Current value: 25165824" message.

Sorry for the nonsense.
Jonathan