udev is killing cronscripts/process-pending-packagediffs.py

[Steve McInerney]

We've had several cases in the past 2 days where cronscripts/process-pending-packagediffs.py is chewing vast amounts of memory on germanium.
The root cause appears to be a known issue around debdiff being unable to process udev.

2009-09-14 22:48:16 DEBUG Performing package diff for udev from 147~-1~boot1 to 147~-1~boot2
...

The current solution has been to kill the offending processes and run sql updates against the DB to disable the problematic case.
Typically, this process blocks for about an hour before sufficient resources are being consumed that alerts are activated.

Suggestions?
* possibly a fix against debdiff to cope with udev
* automatically filter udev from being processed by process-pending-packagediffs.py, see's it, updates as per the aforementioned query and continues on.
* ...?