Comment 7 for bug 809924

The easiest way to disable the hook is built in to the package. If you run "sudo dpkg-reconfigure debsums" it will ask you "Should debsums files be generated automatically by apt-get?", and you can change the setting to "No". This should fix your system.

Anyways, I looked into solving the actual problem too. Yesterday I uploaded a new debsums to Debian with proper multiarch support (thanks to a patch by Anders Kaseorg).

I tested it on an amd64 system with i386 multiarch libraries installed. With the new Debian version of debsums, running "debsums libc6" correctly lists "x86_64-linux-gnu" files, and running "debsums libc6:i386" correctly lists "i386-linux-gnu" files.

So then on this system I installed the Ubuntu debsums .deb which is supposed to have multiarch support. When running "debsums libc6", it lists the "i386-linux-gnu" files (from libc6:i386, which is wrong), and when running "debsums libc6:i386" it dies of this error: debsums: invalid package name 'libc6:i386'.

While this isn't the exact same problem as the bug reporters had, clearly there is something wrong with the multiarch logic in this version of debsums. I haven't actually tested the new Debian debsums on Ubuntu, but I suspect this would solve it.