[Bug 1611133] Re: dpkg truncates lines in 'status' file which begin with two spaces.

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

Do you have dpkg status files that you can share, both good and bad?

What do you mean by Package comments -> do you mean Description: field?

Looking at my /var/lib/dpkg/status as well as automatic backups in
/var/backups/dpkg.status.* I don't see a single package with a Comment:
field.

Do you have sample .deb packages, which result in truncation post
install?

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html mentions
Comment: field, however, as an example of user-defined / custom fields,
which would not be standards compliant / shouldn't be part of any Ubuntu
package.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1611133

Title:
  dpkg truncates lines in 'status' file which begin with two spaces.

Status in dpkg package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  On Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS command dpkg version 1.16.1.2ubuntu7.7 seems to
  experience issues when updating packages.

  In one instance the status file seems to have over a thousand lines
  that have been truncated. It only seems to truncate package comments
  that are indented with two spaces. No indent or single space indent
  lines are all fine but lines that have a double space get truncated.
  They are not gone in the file they are just replaced by a line that
  has two spaces and a new line.

  
  Programmatically I would describe the problem as in perhaps a failure in reading the comment from the source and writing an empty string into the target:

  Comment = read_comment(next_line);

  fprintf(Status, "  %s\n", Comment);

  So if there was an error in read_comment and function returned an
  empty string "", this would explain why some lines were getting
  truncated.

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