Dpkg bug causes problems in current potato

[Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@iki.fi>]

  Hello everybody

  There is an old bug (#22999, #39204 and others) in dpkg which causes it
  to dump core when asked to configure packages with certain kinds of
  circular dependencies. The cmucl packages in potato trigger this bug
  (and different package sets have triggered this in the past), and
  many duplicate reports have been filed. There is no immediate way
  to fix the dpkg bug, but there are two easy workarounds:

    1) for developers: don't put offending dependencies in packages (test
       the install before uploading!)

    2) for users: configure one of the offending packages with
        --force-depends, for example with
	 dpkg --configure --force-depends cmucl

  According to Peter Van Eynde, cmucl maintainer, 1) is not trivially
  done with the cmucl suite, so we'll probably have this problem for
  a while.  Please, *do not* file a bug report about this!  The problem is already
  known.
    
  Thanks.

-- 
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%

   "... memory leaks are quite acceptable in many applications ..."
    (Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++, page 220)