Package: dpkg Version: 1.4.1.13_i386 When I install/upgrade packages I now and then get an error message about how the <package>.list file for some package contains an empty filename. As far as I remember, this <package> is usually one that the package being installed depends on in some way.
dpkg quits after this, and apt-get/dselect gives up also. When I look at /var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.list I see that the usual list of plaintext filenames isn't there, the content is binary. I don't know why this happens, but it is annoying. It is always only one ruined package, this makes me believe dpkg does the trashing shortly before the error message. I have seen this for a long time, (since slink) but I thought it was a bad disk. But now I see this on two newer machines also. I rebuild the <package>.list file by running dpkg --contents against the package.deb file. Then I trim off unnecessary stuff from the file list. This gets boring after a while. It happens only occationally, perhaps once per 50 packages installed. A wild guess: I dpkg using mmap for looking at file lists? If it does, and it is a writeable mapping, then a random pointer error could do something like this. Kernel versions: 2.3.6 - 2.3.20 C library: libc-2.1.2.so Hardware doesn't matter, this happens with scsi drives, ide drives, single and multiple processors. Helge Hafting
