mangled packages

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2013 at 01:29:45PM +0100, Colin Law wrote:
> On 8 August 2013 13:08, Art Edwards
> <edwardsa at icantbelieveimdoingthis.com> wrote:
> > While doing a routine dist-upgrade, I found that several packages were mangled.
> > I'm running 12.04 on a dual-core, amd, 64 bit machine. Here is a typical error:
> >
> > dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 37548 package 'liblcms2-2:amd64':
> >  missing description
> > dpkg: error: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 37548:
> >  field name `' must be followed by colon
> > E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
> > A package failed to install.  Trying to recover:
> 
> I believe that you can re-generate that file by
> 
> sudo dpkg --clear-avail
> sudo apt-get update

I don't think apt-get update does it, but "sudo dselect update" will.
Or:

  sudo sh -c 'apt-cache dumpavail >/var/lib/dpkg/available'

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]