Re: alternatives DB corruption
Am Mi, 20.07.2011, 14:40 schrieb Raphael Hertzog:
> On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Michael Neuffer wrote:
>> > The database file is corrupted. What did you do to corrupt it? Is
>> there a
>> > reliable way to corrupt it?
>>
>> Yes, by editing it by hand. :-)
>
> So there's no bug in update-alternatives at least.
No, not that I know of.
>> I had to do it a few weeks earlier to remove
>> some alternatives that were corrupted by a broken package.
>> (Things that constantly using unstable can do to you...)
>
> Hum, that should not happen. You should always be able to
> update-alternatives to fix stuff.
Not when you manage to get into circular dependencies.
>> I had to edit and fix alternatives manually every now and then over the
>> past 15 years or so and never had (major) problems with that. Maybe I
>> was
>> just lucky so far.
>
> You won't have to do this in the future, update-alternatives no longer
> allows installation of broken alternatives and fixes stuff itself for most
> cases.
When did that change get rolled out?
>> > It lacks lots of empty lines at the end. Each alternative should have
>> a
>> > set of line like this:
>> > [...]
>> Yes I removed them. I wasn't aware that they were significant.
>
> *shrug*
:-)
>> The file format unfortunately isn't documented in the man page.
>
> Because it's not meant to be edited with anything else than
> update-alternatives...
Maybe a warning in the manpage would be good.
Manually fixing up dpkg status & info files becomes an ingrained habit
over the years. The Debian & Ubuntu bleeding egde will cut you every now
and then with problems that force manual intervention.
>> Is there a way to find out how many empty lines are missing where?
>
> I documented the format above...
Yes thank you for that.
> in your specific case you need 15 lines
> in total (master + priority + 13 slaves). You already have 4 lines so you
> need 11 empty lines after.
Thanks! I'll give it a shot when I'm back home. Currently I don't have my
laptop with me.
Cheers
Mike
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