costela.net

UPDATE: Nevermind, nothing to see here, move along… Steve Kemp helpfully pointed out to me the obvious thing I had missed: status-old isn’t the only backup, there’s /var/backups/dpkg.status.*! Oops… doubly stupid.

After seeing madduck’s post and feeling my dpkg was certainly not as quick as it used to be, I decided to try the suggested status-file cleanup.

Since madduck is an old-time Debian developer (actually just one year longer than I am, but certainly way more active) I just assumed he’d have better understanding of dpkg’s inner workings than I do, so I blindly – and wrongly – copy-pasted his code and managed to erase my dpkg status file.
No backups were made out of sheer trust-induced stupidity and the status-old file was somehow also nuked, probably because of something I ran before noticing the problem.

It’s obviously not his fault that I didn’t pay attention to what I was doing, but by then I had royally messed up my machine, basically nuking dpkg, so I had to come up with this ugly little script to try and rebuild the status file.
If someone else managed to do the same absurd mistake, this could help.

#!/bin/bash
 
ls -1 /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list | sed -r 's/.*\/(.*).list$/\1/' | while read PACKAGE; do 
	echo Package: $PACKAGE
	if [ -d /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE ]; then 
		if [ -f /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE/changelog.Debian.gz ]; then
			VERSION=`zcat /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE/changelog.Debian.gz | head -1 | sed -r 's/.*\((.*?)\).*/\1/'`
		elif [ -f /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE/changelog.Debian ]; then # downfall of the ia32-* hack
			VERSION=`head -1 /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE/changelog.Debian | sed -r 's/.*\((.*?)\).*/\1/'`
		elif [ -f /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE/changelog.gz ]; then
			VERSION=`zcat /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE/changelog.gz | head -1 | sed -r 's/.*\((.*?)\).*/\1/'`
		else
			VERSION=0 # force upgrade, probably locally-built
		fi
 
		echo Status: install ok installed
		echo Version: ${VERSION}
		STRIP_FIELDS="Version|Package|Size|Filename|MD5sum|SHA1|SHA256|Tag|Task"
		CONFFILES_LIST=conffiles
	else
		echo Status: deinstall ok config-files
		STRIP_FIELDS="Package|Size|Filename|MD5sum|SHA1|SHA256|Tag|Task"
		# in this case we treat all remaining files as conffiles
		# (if there are no docs, there's no .conffiles either)
		CONFFILES_LIST=list
	fi
	if [ -s /var/lib/dpkg/info/${PACKAGE}.${CONFFILES_LIST} ]; then
		echo Conffiles:
		cat /var/lib/dpkg/info/${PACKAGE}.${CONFFILES_LIST} | while read CONFFILE; do
			if [ -f $CONFFILE ]; then
				echo " $CONFFILE `md5sum $CONFFILE | awk '{ print $1 }'`"; 
			fi
		done
	fi
	# "grep-available --invert-show" doesn't work as expected, so we grep the fields out
	(grep-aptavail --mmap -P $PACKAGE -X || (echo package $PACKAGE not found, leaving minimal entry 1>&2 ; echo -e "Version: 0+borkdstatus\n")) | grep -Ev "^($STRIP_FIELDS):"
done

Known limitations:

• Needs root access to create some conffile md5sums
• Can’t detect virtual packages, like nvidia-kernel-* stuff and probably everything created with module-assistant. A reinstall of the created packages in /usr/src/*.deb should suffice
• Some packages do some version black-magic in the changelog (gcc-defaults comes to mind). I couldn’t find a better way to get the actual installed version, but a dist-upgrade after restoring the file should just re-install the affected packages.
• Won’t correctly detect packages in an intermediary state like “unpacked, but not configured” (haven’t tested this)
• Can’t detect purged packages at all, though this shouldn’t be a problem

Did I miss something? Is there a tool or a dpkg option that does this in a smarter/easier way?

“I’m gonna [flock of crows] you and your whole family!”

I consider myself a pretty good English speaker, so it murders me (ha!) to admit I didn’t know that particular meaning. Some less common words, sure, those are quite likely to have some unknown or obscure semantic gotcha, but new meanings to common words are a genuine surprise when they come along.

There is this feeling in the back of my head that I might have seen this already, reading some book, and forgotten about it later, or maybe I just glossed over my faulty comprehension telling myself I was too stupid to understand the literary genius and subtlety of the author. That seems to happen pretty often.

The question remains whether the language influenced the cultural association from crows and bad omens or the other way around. Or perhaps it’s just a freak coincidence.
It’s times like this I wish I had a nice etymological dictionary.