Certain characters (e.g. ':') in package version numbers cause Dpkg provider to install things repeatedly.

The package in question is for the Zabbix monitoring agent (which isn't in a repository, so must be installed from package) and it has an "odd" version number:

$ dpkg-deb -W /tmp/zabbix-agent_1.8.3-2_amd64.deb
zabbix-agent 1:1.8.3-2

This is the regular expression currently used by Chef::Provider::Package::Dpkg to parse this output:

/([a-z\d\-\+]+)\t([\w\d.-]+)/

which results in the version always appearing to be "1" because the colon is not accepted. Since 1 != 1:1.8.3-2, a reinstall happens every time. This can easily be fixed by adding a colon to the list of acceptable characters:

/([a-z\d\-\+]+)\t([\w\d.:-]+)/
^

This bug still seems to exist in the current git version...