Comment 28 for bug 1015567

Dmitrijs,

The problem is that people who tripped over this bug cannot use the normal methods to upgrade to get the fix. We greatly appriciate that the bug is now fixed so this won't trash everyone else's systems, but the question is how to fix the systems that this bug already trashed.

I got out of it by editing /var/lib/dpkg/status to add an arch entry when one wasn't present.

However, most people are not going to be comfortable doing that, so what can they do?

I suspect that this is going to require downloading a fixed dpkg binary from somewhere, and then running something with that to get the fix properly.

I could find the package, download it, extract it, and replace the binary, but there is probably a much cleaner way to do this, but it will take someone who knows the debian packaging internals better than I do to identify what is the minimum safe thing to do.

David Lang