Bug#1054552: glibc: stat fails when access time is bogus

[Jarek Czekalski]

Package: libglib2.0-0:i386
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: jarekczek at poczta.onet.pl

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where 
appropriate ***

    * What led up to the situation?
I tried to upgrade system (apt-get upgrade), but it failed in dpkg:

Unpacking initscripts (3.06-4) over (2.96-7+deb11u1) ...
dpkg: error processing archive 
/var/cache/apt/archives/initscripts_3.06-4_all.deb (--unpack):
  unable to stat './var/log' (which was about to be installed): Value 
too large for defined data type

stat /var/log

   File: /var/log
   Size: 4096            Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: 8,1     Inode: 2752691     Links: 12
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/ root)
Access: 2040-05-10 23:31:40.285032309 +0200
Modify: 2023-10-25 16:03:42.313742411 +0200
Change: 2023-10-25 16:03:42.313742411 +0200
  Birth: 2017-02-27 09:46:56.739719147 +0100

This date (2040) causes dpkg to fail. The workaround is correcting it by 
touch /var/log.

Running system with bogus date (2040).
    * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
      ineffective)?
touch /var/log
    * What was the outcome of this action?
dpkg started working
    * What outcome did you expect instead?
dpkg should work with strange date or give a better message. Maybe just 
documentation (for stat) should be fixed and suggest problems with dates.

Current outcome is as follows: apt-get suddenly fails with a cryptic 
message (initially it was "unable to stat '.'" instead of /var/log). It 
may be extremely difficult to diagnose the issue.

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-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.2
   APT prefers stable-updates
   APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 
'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-20-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), 
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled