Package: apt Version: 0.3.14 excalibur:/home/xxiii/Eiffel/radacct# apt-get -v apt 0.3.14 for i386 compiled on Nov 7 1999 20:34:21 excalibur:/home/xxiii/Eiffel/radacct# uname -a Linux excalibur 2.2.10 #2 Wed Jun 16 00:23:31 EST 1999 i686 unknown excalibur:/home/xxiii/Eiffel/radacct# ls -l /lib/libc.so.6 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Nov 9 16:35 /lib/libc.so.6 -> libc-2.1.2.so
When using apt-get in a terminal window with a very long line length (such as 306 characters) there will be a segmentation fault. Reinvoking apt seems to work ok, continuing where it left off. If downloading something large, one may go through several cycles of segmentation faults. Shrinking my terminal window down to a smaller column count (153) got rid of the segmentation faults entirely. I would guess that the problem is in the code or library which updates the bytes transferred line during a download. In experimenting, it appears the longer the line length, the sooner the segmentation fault. It appears as if a char was used as a counter or index somewhere with the assumption that it would never overflow. Which package is retreived is irrelevant, as long as it is big enough for the segmentation fault to occur before it is fully retreived. some example output: excalibur:/home/xxiii/Eiffel/radacct# apt-get install dnsutils Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done 1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 53 not upgraded. Need to get 334kB of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used. Get:1 ftp://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main dnsutils 1:8.2.2p3-1 [334kB] 50% [1 dnsutils 169360/334kB 50%]Segmentation fault excalibur:/home/xxiii/Eiffel/radacct# apt-get install dnsutils Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done 1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 53 not upgraded. Need to get 334kB of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used. Fetched 334kB in 1s (279kB/s) debconf: failed to initialize Dialog frontend debconf: falling back to Text frontend 100% [Scanning packages] (Reading database ... 33131 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace dnsutils 1:8.2.2-4 (using .../dnsutils_1%3a8.2.2p3-1_i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement dnsutils ... Setting up dnsutils (8.2.2p3-1) ...

