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• Failure to recover from APT lists that are de-synchronized with the packages cache
• Failure to recover from broken APT lists

Plan to fix this: #18620 (comment 181403)

While we're at it we could solve #18657.

Failure to recover from APT lists that are de-synchronized with the packages cache

See #17392 (closed), #16567 (closed), #16566 (closed).

Failure to recover from broken APT lists

Multiple users have reported to Help Desk that they receive the following error when using the Additional Software feature:

E: Splitting of clearsigned file /var/lib/apt/lists/cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org_debian_dists_buster_InRelease failed as it doesn't contain all expected parts
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
E: _cache->open() failed, please report.

WB reports:

• faf403d6a0fbd8e77e107440ac32ea7f: no more info than what this issue says
• fbcbff11c73c393b66d1ba5448d9d3a8:
  • error follows unclean shutdown + starting Synaptic which fails to download APT lists
  • tails-additional-software-install.service failed with the same error ("INFO] E: Splitting of clearsigned file")
  • tails-additional-software-upgrade.service runs apt update which fails to fetch the Translation-en files for a few archives (while others work just fine); the service notices the failure but I see no trace of restoring the old APT lists in the logs
• 7b2e7b5ddca8c6b44814382399e98b96
  • tails-additional-software-install.service restored old APT lists, which are corrupted too ("too" because if there are old lists, that indicates the new ones may be broken)
  • tails-additional-software-upgrade.service is not started, presumably because tails-additional-software-install.service failed: this looks incorrect, because tails-additional-software-upgrade.service is our chance to recover from such failures. Except in this case it would not have helped, because the same recovery fails with Synaptic:
  • The user started Synaptic, which failed to update or to read the APT lists
• af8ab8ff207b7a4c3a927923dea5808: no more info than what this issue says
• 1c894357e7a235c81b1b0c9772ad0e50
  • no old APT lists were found and restored: tails-additional-software-install.service fails due to corrupted APT lists