[ale] Alien error

[joh6nn at hotpop.com (joh6nn)]

sort of a convoluted path to follow, but here goes:

i noticed that i could consistently crash Gaim, so before filing a bug
report, i thought to try moving from 1.5 up to the 2.0 beta, and see if
the bug was still present.  however, i'm running Kubuntu, and the new
beta seems to be available only as either a source tar-ball, or as an
rpm.  i didn't really want to compile from source, so i thought, "no
problem, just 'apt-get install alien', and be on my way".  no dice.  i
can convert a .deb package to .rpm without any problems, but .rpm to
.deb will fail with the following error message, regardless of .rpm (i
downloaded some others just to check):

Error executing "LANG=C rpm -qp --queryformat %{SUMMARY} gaim.rpm":  at
/usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package.pm line 449.

i've googled, and found other people have had similar problems, but the
pages i found were in languages i don't speak, and there were no
immediately obvious solutions provided.

anyone have an idea?


-joh6nn