Hi everyone, I ran into a packaging issue with the wolfram-engine package distributed through the Raspberry Pi OS archive. The package metadata currently breaks strict Debian control-file parsers due to an invalid field value.

To be clear, this is not a bug in the Wolfram Language or the core Wolfram Engine software itself. This is a metadata issue related to the Linux packaging and maintenance.

AI Usage Statement: Google Gemini 3.1 Pro was used to assist with translation and grammar refinement for this post.

The Problem

In the trixie binary-arm64 package index, the package metadata contains a non-integer Installed-Size value:

Package: wolfram-engine
Version: 15.0.1+202608182322
Architecture: arm64
Installed-Size: 5316364.474609375

Debian Policy §5.6.20 dictates that Installed-Size must be the accumulated size of installed files "rounded to 1 KiB" (i.e., a plain integer). I confirmed this value exists in the official Raspberry Pi archive, so it originates from the build process.

Why APT Appears Unaffected

You might be wondering why standard apt doesn't complain. APT parses this field using C's strtoull, which reads the leading digits and silently ignores the trailing .474609375. The invalid value is masked by APT's permissive parsing behavior.

The Impact

I use oma (a user-friendly APT frontend/package manager developed by the AOSC OS community). It parses package indexes strictly according to Debian policy.

Because Installed-Size is parsed as an integer, the decimal point causes the entire index parse to fail:

ERROR Failed to parse apt lists: Failed to parse deb822 data in
.../mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn_raspberrypi_dists_trixie_main_binary-arm64_Packages:
parsing field Installed-Size: invalid digit found in string

This will affect any software or script that parses the field strictly, not just oma.

Request

Could the team review the package build scripts and ensure the generated Installed-Size is a valid integer (like what dpkg-gencontrol normally produces)? The corrected value should likely be 5316364 (or 5316365 depending on your rounding preference).

Thanks in advance for looking into this!