Package: libc6 (unstable) Version: 2.3.1-6 Severity: critical Earlier today, had an "unstable" workstation I decided to do an "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade" to get the latest & greatest. All is well for a few minutes, until such time as the apt-get blows up during the software install. Something about unable to stat directory /var/cache/apt/updates/, libc6 not configured properly. Uh oh, this doesn't sound good. (Sorry I didn't have the foresight to write down the exact messages, but if you'll read on, hopefully I can document this enough to be reproducable).
All of my open X apps are running fine, but things are weird in the shell. dpkg dies with the same error (complains about /var/cache/apt/updates) whenever I try to do anything with it. I can't reference the current "." directory, top and ps both run but they don't show any process information, etc. I figure I'm hosed, but give a fresh reboot just in case. LILO starts normally but all I get at the login prompt is "unable to determine TTY". Interesting. At this point, though, I was curious whether I had just stumbled across some weird anomaly caused by a strange combination of packages on my machine, or whether something was seriously broked in unstable distro. Since there was no vital data on the machine, I reformatted and did a fresh install of Debian 3.0r0 from CD, just the base system to get to a shell prompt and essential packages. I set my apt source to "unstable" (server ftp://ftp.debian.org) and tried to install just the same libc6 that had caused problems before: "apt-get update;apt-get install libc6", which causes dpkg to break exactly as described above, and leaves the system in exactly the same unusable state. Target machine is a Pentium-III 450, 256MB, which had been running Debian unstable for at least 6 months with no problems. The problem occured with both kernel 2.4.17 (first time) and 2.2.18 (or whatever kernel 3.0 stable installs by default). Sorry some of this isn't better documented, but as I said, all I had to do to reproduce it was install the unstable libc6 package on a fresh stable system. I won't be around the machine in question again until next week, but would be happy to answer any questions that might be useful. -- sonicforest.com
