Duplicate packages entries en AptPkg::Cache

[Javier Amor Garcia]

Package version 0.1.25build2
Ubuntu version 12.04 Ubuntu precise (development branch)

I have only seen this problem in one machine out of tens.

The AptPkg::Cache has duplicate key entries for the packages. Normally perl has could not have duplicates keys but his is a tied hash .

I attached the cache.pl simple script to test it.:

====
use strict;
use warnings;
use AptPkg::Cache;

my $cache = AptPkg::Cache->new();
foreach my $key (keys %{$cache}) {
    print "$key\n";
}

print "Done";

1;
====

In the affected machine we get duplciate entries for all packages:
root@host:~# perl cache.pl | tail
libsdbm-ruby1.8
libsdbm-ruby1.8
libreoffice-l10n-ga
libindicate-doc
libungif4g
libungif4g
libreadline-dev
libreadline-dev
libpng12-dev
libpng12-dev

====

However if we use apt-cache all is normal:
root@zentyal23:~# apt-cache policy libpng12-dev
libpng12-dev:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 1.2.46-3ubuntu4
  Version table:
     1.2.46-3ubuntu4 0
        500 http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main amd64 Packages
====

The sources.list used in this test (I only let one entry to simplify thing):

root@zentyal23:~# cat /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted
=====

Also I have tested to run apt-get update but this not fixed the problem, anyway apt-cache and apt-get works as expected so this should be a specific problem of libapt-pkg-perl

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Andrew Ayer (agwa)]

Are you seeing this behavior on a multi-arch system (i.e. a system where `dpkg --print-foreign-architectures` has non-empty output)? I discovered that the keys method of AptPkg::Cache returns one copy of each package name for every architecture (so if you have 3 architectures, you'll see each package name 3 times). See Debian bug #707142.

[Javier Amor Garcia (javier-amor-garcia)]

Sorry, I don't remember and I have not longer access to the system