On Fri, 16 Jan 2015 23:49:24 +0100
Adam Borowski <kilobyte@???> wrote:

> 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.

It wasn't that I had corrupted them, they never got built in the first
place. But in researching these missing files (it was status I noticed
first), I discovered that if someone had gotten them corrupted, there
was no way to rebuild them.

How did I end up with non-existant or empty files (sorry, don't
remember which)? Run debootstrap on Gentoo, not Debian. If you do
that (dpkg isn't available), it uses ar to open the files. And ar
doesn't write those files (or leaves them empty). It built partial
chroot jails. Some packages were installed, some weren't. It is
likely true that some were only partially installed.

If there was a Perl version of dpkg, I could go back to trying this
chroot thing.

Gord