On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 02:54:32PM -0700, Gordon Haverland wrote:
> I happened across one, in trying to get debootstrap to run on Gentoo
> (to make a chroot jail). If something corrupts the status

How did you manage to corrupt them without hardware issues? dpkg goes
really, really paranoid there -- for example, it sacrifices speed to such
a point that running dpkg under eatmydata can give more than 10x speedup.

> or available files in /var/lib/dpkg

/var/lib/dpkg/available is pretty much obsolete in the apt world.

Pretty much the only files I ever have to edit not because of a hardware
fault are /var/lib/dpkg/*.{pre,post}{rm,inst} and even that during a rare
screw-up in unstable (aptly named) or when mixing 2009-era Maemo with modern
unstable... And considering the effort needed to make the latter even
possible (wild patching of dpkg to get, eg, xz support), you can see how
rock stable dpkg is.

> the system is hooped, and re-install may be the easiest thing to do.
>
> I believe that one of the problems with trying to
> fix those two files, is that it isn't really known what gets put in
> there. Perhaps that itch could get scratched?

You must be doing something utterly wrong, somehow.

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