Package: dpkg
Version: 1.18.4
Severity: minor
We read
--forget-old-unavail
Now obsolete and a no-op as dpkg will automatically forget unin-
stalled unavailable packages (since dpkg 1.15.4).
Well my /var/lib/dpkg/status has an odd six line entry
Package: libsasl2-3
Status: install ok not-installed
Priority: standard
Section: libs
Architecture: i386
Multi-Arch: same
that is not in sid or experimental anymore. Nor was it in grep-available.
(By 'forget' one guesses that you mean all of /var/lib/dpkg/* .)
Anyways, I got rid of it with
# dpkg -P libsasl2-3:i386
dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove libsasl2-3:i386 which isn't installed
# dpkg -P libsasl2-3
dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove libsasl2-3:i386 which isn't installed
# dpkg -P libsasl2-3
dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove libsasl2-3:i386 which isn't installed
The second one did the job! Note the identical error messages. Bad too.
But on the other hand, you (the dpkg authors) never expected that that
entry would still be there...
So now
# grep -c not-installed /var/lib/dpkg/status
0
So I am guessing, whatever mechanism you are using to make sure no
non-installed entries remain in /var/lib/dpkg/status misses catching
smaller entries like the above!
