It seems the odd characters do in fact have a valid UTF-8 encoding, but
for some reason they have been encoded incorrectly. I was able to fix
them as follows:
cat /var/lib/dpkg/status | iconv -c -f utf-8 -t utf-8 > /tmp/status.fixed
cat /var/lib/dpkg/available | iconv -c -f utf-8 -t utf-8 > /tmp/available.fixed
Now you still have to replace the originals with the fixed copies. In my
case, there were about 100 offending packages:
hwdata ("Noël Köthe" -> "Noël Köthe")
shared-mime-info ("Sebastian Dröge" -> "Sebastian Dröge")
glines
...
I have the impression there is a structural root cause for this, it's
not just about a rare and obscure package with a rogue character.
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1053749
Title:
UnicodeDecodeError from broken package descriptions
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