Hi! On Sat, 2012-12-01 at 20:38:50 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: > Package: dpkg > Version: 1.16.9 > Severity: normal
> I discovered this in the installation log of a freshly installed wheezy > test system. The log contained messages like this: > > dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 219 package > 'libtext-wrapi18n-perl': > missing description > > I was able to reproduce it after installation using apt-get install. > See for example this run: > > root@skolelinuxtest:~# LANG=C apt-get install kde-i18n-nn [...] > root@skolelinuxtest:~# Because those fields are missing from the available file, the warnings will be printed whenever dpkg tools make use of it, which right now is less common than it was in the past. You should also see the warnings if you call «dpkg -i» directly or «dpkg-query --load-avail -l '*'» for example. That's to be expected. > Looking in /var/lib/dpkg/available, I find entries like this, where > there is a "Description-en" field but no "Description" field. This is due to the split Translation repository files, and something that has inserted those wrongly into the available file. We'd have to find what program did that, and then reassign there. For example «apt-cache dumpavail» from sid behaves more or less correctly. Was it obvious from the log when did it start to warn? Maybe the file was not right from the start; I'm not sure if d-i populates it. > Package: libtext-wrapi18n-perl [...] > Description-en: internationalized substitute of Text::Wrap > This module is a substitution for Text::Wrap, supporting > multibyte characters such as UTF-8, EUC-JP, and GB2312, fullwidth > characters such as east Asian characters, combining characters > such as diacritical marks and Thai, and languages which don't > use whitespaces between words such as Chinese and Japanese. > . > It provides wrap(). [...] > Description-md5: 7cfec94f97ab774b331a41f9dbcb99e1 [...] > > Perhaps that is the cause of these reports? Should dpkg accept either > Description or Description-en as a valid description? Yes, that's the reason, and while dselect should ideally get support for translated Descriptions at some point, I'm not sure it makes much sense to do the same for dpkg as it works oblivious to any repository. I've noted it down as an item for my pending discussion with frontend developers, though. Thanks, Guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
