Error when installing scanner deb on 20.04

[Caleb McKay]

Trying to install .deb for Brother ADS-2200 scanner. Worked previously in 18.04, 18.10, 19.04 and 19.10.

If I double click on the .deb, Gnome Software attempts to install and fails with the following error:

Failed to install file: not supported

If I use apt to install the file manually I get the following error:

sudo apt install ./brscanads2200ads2700w-0.1.15-1.amd64.deb
Reading package lists... Error!
E: Problem parsing Provides line of brscanads2200ads2700w:amd64=0.1.15-1
E: Error occurred while processing brscanads2200ads2700w (NewVersion2)
E: Problem with MergeList /home/caleb/Downloads/brscanads2200ads2700w-0.1.15-1.amd64.deb
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

I installed using dpkg without any errors.

[Caleb McKay (caleb-9)]

Okay, well I was wrong. dpkg or gdebi will successfully install the .deb, but the scanner doesn't actually work.

[David Kalnischkies (donkult)]

Without looking at the deb file, this is likely a regression of 2.0 which was fixed in the recently released 2.0.1 in Debian. Pretty sure that will eventually flow into Ubuntu as well. See the commit in question for details if you are interested: https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/commit/bf46e09f0e4b52b3c71ac20bb11e7511fc16179f

That the scanner doesn't seem to work for you is orthogonal to this issue. You might want to contact a support channel of Ubuntu about this with more details – bugreports tend not be a good place for getting hardware to behave with drivers in third-party packages. Thanks for reporting your issue none the less!

[Caleb McKay (caleb-9)]

Issue is resolved now and scanner works if you would like to close. Thanks!