Very Computer

Don't worry, I'm not here with a controvercial and/or misguided oppinion
this time...  ;)  I need a little help from those much wiser than myself...

I'm running Debian; mostly sarge (little woody, a pinch of sid, and maybe
even a few potato's here and there), and am having some rather annoying
trouble with apt/dpkg...

Is there anyway to regenerate the /var/lib/apt/status (or similar) file
which holds the list of installed and avaliable packages...?

The file became corrupt after an mmap failure which running "apt-get
update", and hasn't been the same since (basically, short of deleting the
file, there was no way to get apt to run without that mmap error).  I have a
copy of the corrupted status file, but the daily backups prior to the
corruption were not being made due to another (unrelated) glitch which I've
only recently become aware of and fixed.

fredderic

Fredderic enlightened us with:

Quote:> Is there anyway to regenerate the /var/lib/apt/status (or similar)
> file which holds the list of installed and avaliable packages...?

Have you tried removing the file and running 'apt-get update' again?

Sybren
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Quote:> > Is there anyway to regenerate the /var/lib/apt/status (or similar)
> > file which holds the list of installed and avaliable packages...?
> Have you tried removing the file and running 'apt-get update' again?

Yeah.  And the darned thing forgot what packages were installed in the
system.  I had a * of a time trying to convince it that dpkg and apt
were installed.  And that was after I managed to get it to accept libc6 as
installed.  Still not 100% certain how I got that set in there, a lot of
fiddling and fuddling, and general arse rather than class...  But it worked.

I fudged a set-selections to dpkg (or was it apt?), based on a "ls /usr/doc
| sed ......" command.  But now it wants to re-download all the packages I
had installed, a bunch of which appear to no longer exist (which is causing
just a little strife)...  Seems to be upset at having all these packages
installed, but no information about their contents. ;)