apt-spy ... Segmentation fault ... sigh

Well, one of my favorite programs that I had been using on most of my debian boxen has been broken for some time now. The program is apt-spy. With the latest version 3.1-14.1 you might get something like this:

# apt-spy -d unstable -o ./output.sources.txt -w outputFile.txt -n 20
Couldn't find country LU . Skipping.

SERVER: ftp.at.debian.org
Benchmarking FTP...
      Downloaded 4770019 bytes in 12.55 seconds
      Download speed: 371.05 kB/sec
Benchmarking HTTP...
      Downloaded 4770019 bytes in 11.22 seconds
      Download speed: 415.06 kB/sec
Segmentation fault

Well, since I am an idiot, this is how I started dealing with this issue as root:

# cp -p /var/lib/apt-spy/mirrors.txt .
# apt-get --purge remove apt-spy
# wget -c http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/apt-spy/apt-spy_3.1-13_i386.deb
# dpkg -i apt-spy_3.1-13_i386.deb
# cp -p ./mirrors.txt /var/lib/apt-spy/.
# echo "apt-spy hold" | dpkg --set-selections

Now I do not get the Segmentation fault. But another long standing issue with apt-spy, as one poster has mentioned, is that

apt-spy ... will report 6 out of 7 servers as non-functioning, while in reality all except 1 are functioning

Well after investigating this issue a bit, it looks like the default file that apt-spy uses to test each repository is "/debian/ls-lR", while the repositories usually have no such file. More of the repositories appear to have a file called "/debian/ls-lR.gz" instead, imagine that.

So now my command line is something like this:
apt-spy -d unstable -f ls-lR.gz -o ./output.sources.txt -w outputFile.txt -n 20
And most of the servers get a hit off of this file.

You may also want to read my next post on this subject. Hope this helps someone.