apt fails to get update for language files

[Roland Giesler]

My system: Ubuntu 14:04

$ uname -a
kernel: Linux roland-nb 3.13.0-30-generic #55-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 4 21:40:53 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ dpkg -l apt-utils
ii apt-utils 1.0.1ubuntu2.1 amd64

I have repeatedly, over the last two months, been having this problem when updates are run automatically with update-manager. When I then run "apt-get update", I get this error:

Reading package lists... Error!
E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/za.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_main_i18n_Translation-en
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

There is a workaround. Delete the file and rerun the update, but this is always the same file (i18n_Translation-en) and my machine is connected to an good internet connection when this happens.

There has been a similar report in previous version that have been fixed, like bug #1254271 and bug #346386, but this seems a new case, since it always affects the language file.

[Roland Giesler (lifeboy)]

Today this happened again. The network was not down, the update procress just trashed this file /var/lib/apt/lists/za.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_main_i18n_Translation-en.

$ ls -la /var/lib/apt/lists/za.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_main_i18n_Translation-en
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 139409 Jul 22 20:39 /var/lib/apt/lists/za.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_main_i18n_Translation-en

$ md5sum /var/lib/apt/lists/za.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_main_i18n_Translation-en
9973902173d752742a88d4fba41b5f43 /var/lib/apt/lists/za.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_main_i18n_Translation-en

Note: This also happens on another machine runing 14.04 in exactly the same way.

So since this is happening on more than one machine and repeatedly, I'm updating this to confirmed