Package: dpkg
Version: 1.20.12
Severity: wishlist
We had a similar issue as reported in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=47839 and researched what did
cause the malformed .list package.
In our case we did install a package from a 3rd party which apparently uses a
non-conforming .deb package building tool (unknown to us) resulting in a
malformed data.tar.gz
dpkg did allow this package to be completely installed but generated a
malformed .list file.
This as consequence did prevent later installation of any other package as
dpkg's .list file database was broken resulting in the following error message
Selecting previously unselected package <package>.
(Reading database ...
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
files list file for package 'xxx-config--xxx' contains empty filename
Analysis of the .deb package showed
dpkg -c xxx-config-xxx.deb
1 drwxrwxr-x root/root 0 2023-09-07 08:36 ./
2 drwxrwxr-x root/root 0 2023-09-07 08:36 .//
3 drwxrwxr-x root/root 0 2023-09-07 08:36 .//ddd/
4 drwxrwxr-x root/root 0 2023-09-07 08:36 .//ddd/fff/
...
* The offending malform is the second line containing './/' which is not
conform to standard, resulting in the following .list file
cat -v -t -e ./lib/dpkg/info/xxx-config-xxx.list
1 /.$
2 /$
3 /ddd$
4 /ddd/fff$
...
* the '/$' does break the .list file parsing when later installing other .deb
packages
Clearly the root cause is the use of 3rd party malformed .deb package tooling
nevertheless my wish to improve would be following:
1. As dpkg does parse all existing .list files during installation of a .deb
package and understand if one of them is malformed it shall do this also for
the newly generated .deb package .list file.
2. If the newly generated .deb package .list file does fail the check
installation shall be aborted and rolled back.
I am using
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Release: 11
Codename: bullseye
With best regards,
Tobias
