more robustnesss against broken Translation files

[TheOldFellow]

Binary package hint: update-manager

After recent updates to Karmic (I was away for a week), Update-manager, apt-get and Synaptic all crash when run:

Could not initialise the package information

An unresolvable problem occurred while initialising the package information.

Please report this bug for the 'update-manager' package and try to include the following error message:

'E:Encountered a section with no Package: header, E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_main_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.'

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Please attach the file
/var/lib/apt/lists/gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_main_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
to this bugreport and remove it afterwards.

[TheOldFellow (theoldfellow)]

Attached. I confirm that deleting all the *%5fGB files - see list, corrected the behaviour.

archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_universe_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_main_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_multiverse_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_restricted_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_universe_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB

[TheOldFellow (theoldfellow)]

Attached. I confirm that deleting all the *%5fGB files - see list, corrected the behaviour.

archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_universe_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_main_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_multiverse_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_restricted_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB
gb.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_universe_i18n_Translation-en%5fGB

[rt_davies (rt-davies)]

I'd expand scope on this to all files under /var/lib/apt/lists. I can reproduce this issue easily, in fact, it's been happening every day, here's how...

I have the Update Manager setting "Check for updates: Daily", which apparently tries to check for updates as soon as *it thinks* my machine has network access. Problem is that lately I've been connecting to a wireless LAN that immediately establishes a connection, but redirects all traffic to web authentication page (you know the kind? they're common in hotels, conferences, universities, etc). So, as soon as my laptop connects to this network, Update Manager happily updates all the files in /var/lib/app/lists, but the files all contain the html of the wireless LAN authentication page. Then apt, synaptic and update manager all fail miserably until I remove every file.

Obviously, turning off "Check for updates" is a work-around, but then I have to remember to manually check for updates. It would be nice if apt/synaptic/update manager detected bad package list/status files and could recover gracefully.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Well, let's merge it with the master bug then.