[Impact] The Launchpad publisher is producing malformed Task lines in Packages files, which has the potential to cause image builds to be incomplete.
[Test Case] Grab the extra-override input files from the primary archive and try to run apt-ftparchive using them (perhaps cut down to include just the longest lines). It should avoid emitting "Malformed override" messages and should produce non-truncated Task lines in Packages files.
[Regression Potential] Barring toolchain bugs, any regressions should be confined to apt-ftparchive. (But this change is very simple, so I'm not especially worried.)
We see quite a few messages like this from the publisher:
W: Malformed override /srv/launchpad.net/ubuntu-archive/ubuntu-overrides/override.quantal.extra.main line 14628 #2
These correspond to override lines that are too long. This example is:
libmng1/powerpc Task ubuntu-desktop, ubuntu-usb, kubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-active-desktop, kubuntu-active, edubuntu-desktop, edubuntu-desktop-kde, edubuntu-usb, xubuntu-desktop, mythbuntu-frontend, mythbuntu-frontend, mythbuntu-desktop, mythbuntu-backend-slave, mythbuntu-backend-slave, mythbuntu-backend-master, mythbuntu-backend-master, ubuntustudio-generation, ubuntustudio-video, ubuntustudio-audio-plugins, ubuntustudio-publishing, ubuntustudio-photography, ubuntustudio-graphics, ubuntustudio-recording
This carries over into truncated Task fields in Packages files.
Override::ReadOverride currently has "char Line[500]", which is the cause of this. Ideally, this code would handle arbitrary-length lines. However, in practice, the maximum line length we're seeing in quantal is 594, so simply doubling this to 1000 would do nicely for now.
We'll want to fix this in lucid (current publisher host system) and precise (future publisher host system).