Comment 3 for bug 1996489

I think the main problem with the unminimize script in jammy and later is that dpkg 1.21 changed the way it reports missing files: instead of reporting a checksum failure (..5......) it explicitly says "missing" since https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=963087 was implemented, breaking the unminimize logic entirely, as demonstrated by /usr/share/doc/libprocps8/NEWS.Debian.gz still being missing at the end of

$ docker run --rm -it ubuntu:jammy sh -c 'yes | unminimize; dpkg --verify libprocps8'

This affects all packages having anything besides their copyright and changelog under /usr/share/doc but having no man pages nor localization.

The above also explains why unminimize uses different logic for different files: the changelog and copyright files are always kept around, while manuals and localization files are excluded entirely.

The ugly but harmless errors from dpkg -S could be avoided by simply using the --no-run-if-empty option of xargs.

xargs should automatically take care of not exceeding the argument length limit of the system, so I assume the comment mentioning that is stale.