dpkg truncates lines in 'status' file which begin with two spaces.

[Dragan S.]

On Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS command dpkg version 1.16.1.2ubuntu7.7 seems to experience issues when updating packages.

In one instance the status file seems to have over a thousand lines that have been truncated. It only seems to truncate package comments that are indented with two spaces. No indent or single space indent lines are all fine but lines that have a double space get truncated. They are not gone in the file they are just replaced by a line that has two spaces and a new line.

Programmatically I would describe the problem as in perhaps a failure in reading the comment from the source and writing an empty string into the target:

Comment = read_comment(next_line);

fprintf(Status, " %s\n", Comment);

So if there was an error in read_comment and function returned an empty string "", this would explain why some lines were getting truncated.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Do you have dpkg status files that you can share, both good and bad?

What do you mean by Package comments -> do you mean Description: field?

Looking at my /var/lib/dpkg/status as well as automatic backups in /var/backups/dpkg.status.* I don't see a single package with a Comment: field.

Do you have sample .deb packages, which result in truncation post install?

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html mentions Comment: field, however, as an example of user-defined / custom fields, which would not be standards compliant / shouldn't be part of any Ubuntu package.

[Dragan S. (dragan-s)]

Hi Dimitri-

yes my mistake, I meant Description field. I will upload the good and the bad files momentarily...

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

The diff between good and bad looks very bad.

[Louis Bouchard (louis)]

turns out that the issue was caused by an external script which modified the status file.