So, awhile back I found the 'red pill' thing you can do to the app manager. Its been working fine, but the other day its stopped working. When I go in via the command line I get this error

Reading package lists... Error!
E: Problem parsing dependency Depends
E: Error occurred while processing osso-clock-ui (NewVersion1)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/dpkg/status
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.


I've tried apt-get clean, and nothing seems to work. Is this something I've done? Should I turn off the red pill thing? I really hope I don't have to reload from scratch.....

Thanks

It might be the package that is mentioned. In any case, there's a backup of the status file in the same directory, called status-old, from before you last installed or removed a package. Try to replace status with status-old (make a backup first) and see if that fixes it. This will make apt forget about what you last installed/removed but you should be able to just reinstall the package.

I'm getting the same type error trying to open the Application Manager. Except the error line for me lists osso-iradio-applet (NewVersion1).

This is happening after fbreader failed to update. It worked once this morning but after fbreader failed to update, App Manager gives this error in the log when starting up.

All fixed now.
This is what I did in xterm:
sudo su -
cd /var/lib/dpkg
mv status status.xxx
cp status-old status

Then I opened Application Manager and I got no error. Clicked Update Packages and there's an even newer fbreader listed. It updated properly and all is good.

Well, I'm not a big fan of kludges, but this did indeed work! Thanks for the tip danny and Bandit. I wonder if there's a reason why this stopped working or that something got broken? I looked on the developers pages some but didn't see anything.