Comment 7 for bug 970139

I have experienced this bug and it has resulted in the following consequences on my Kubuntu 12.04 amd64 system:

1. Inability to update or upgrade with

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

See example below for error message.

2. Error when trying to install or reinstall any existing package. For instance

sudo apt-get install --reinstall update-notifier-common

gives

---
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/222 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Use of uninitialized value $item in hash element at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/DbDriver/File.pm line 82, <$__ANONIO__> chunk 29.
(Reading database ... 65%dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
 files list file for package 'libhal1' is missing final newline
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
---

For the record, I was told during some upgrade that libhal1 was not needed and could be removed by

sudo apt-get autoremove

and the above error must have resulted from that operation.

3. The system runs but is flaky.

4. I have a new system disk that is less than three months old and is unlikely to be the cause of the above problems.

5. It appears that I need to re-install my system (sigh).

If there is any workaround, I will appreciate knowing about it.

Thank.s