mangled packages

[Colin Law]

On 8 August 2013 14:07, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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'

Yes, you are right.  My mistake.

Colin Law