Bug#192975: dselect failures after recent upgrades

[Richard A Nelson <kenpocowboy@bellsouth.net>]

Package: dselect
Version: 1.10.10
Severity: grave


#dselect update
[...]
Reading Package Lists... Done
Merging Available information
E: Internal Error, Unable to parse a package record

update available list script returned error exit status 100.
Press <enter> to continue.


Happens on three different systems, seems to have started about the time
of recent dpkg/apt updates

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux back40.badlands.org 2.4.21-rc1-ac4 #3 Mon May 5 16:46:17 EDT 2003 i586
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages dselect depends on:
ii  libc6                     2.3.1-17       GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgcc1                   1:3.3-0pre9    GCC support library
ii  libncurses5               5.3.20021109-2 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  libstdc++5                1:3.3-0pre9    The GNU Standard C++ Library v3

-- no debconf information