On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 12:50 AM, Steve McIntyre <st...@einval.com> wrote: > * eventually, after a lot of debugging by a group of people, we > worked out that this was caused by the Packages file missing > Description: fields for all the package entries. Not everybody > could consistently reproduce the problem (and it certainly wasn't > there in squeeze); we worked out that the issue was related to the > Acquire::Languages setting.
That's a known bug. Various code particles assume that there is always a Description available for a package, so you might happen to follow dangling pointers and other dangerous stuff. In your tests with squeeze you might just be lucky – squeeze already had Acquire::Languages implemented, just that the archive didn't used/supported it, but squeeze didn't had split-out long-descriptions so thats probably your problem. > For now, I'm working around this in debian-cd by explicitly adding "-o > Acquire::Languages=none" to the code where I call apt, but I'd love to > know: is this change a deliberate design decision, or a bug? If it's > deliberate, could you please explain the reasoning? I can't see > anything in the Changelog that mentions this behaviour change, > offhand. It was always the case that "apt-cache show foo" would show the Description-$LANG and if that wasn't available Description. The thing that changed now with the split out long-description for en is that even LANG=C has a 'translated' long-description in the form of "Description-en" as "Description" is just a short description. So using =none might be the best you can do if you don't need the description for anything - otherwise I would just sed -i '#^Description-en:#Description:#' and be done. For the APT parsing side we should probably accept "translations" in the Packages file as well instead of just from Translation-* files as there isn't a real reason not to. Best regards David Kalnischkies -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
