[Aptitude-devel] Bug#691370: Bug#691370: W: Operation was interrupted before it could finish

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 25 October 2012 04:44,  <jidanni at jidanni.org> wrote:
> Package: aptitude
>
> If one hits ^C during an upgrade, the upgrade does not stop
> (probably to protect us from damage, OK) but near the end, we see
> "W: Operation was interrupted before it could finish"
>
>
> Please
> 1) add an indication of what program (aptitude?) is giving the message.
> 2) say what operation.
>
> # aptitude full-upgrade
> ...
> Installing new version of config file /etc/java-7-openjdk/security/java.security ...
> Setting up openjdk-7-jre-lib (7u3-2.1.3-1) ...
> Setting up openjdk-7-jre:i386 (7u3-2.1.3-1) ...
> W: Operation was interrupted before it could finish
>
> Current status: 0 updates [-71].

Hello

The warning is from libapt-pkg, so aptitude is the program reporting
it.  The only indication of this is the familiar “W:” mark.  While it
may be useful to change APT to display GNU-style errors (“PROGRAM:
MESSAGE”) there is a lot of inertia behind the current style.

The operation is the entirety of what you asked aptitude to do, in
this case full-upgrade.  When APT receives SIGINT it will allow the
current dpkg run to complete and abort before the next.  There may be
multiple dpkg runs for an operation to allow for package relationships
such as Pre-Depends and Conflicts.  This warning thus indicates that
the operation requested on the command line was left incomplete.  The
APT and dpkg databases should be consistent, though some packages may
be half-installed or missing dependencies, while others are not
installed (or removed) at all.

The term “operation” here seems to be quite useful as a general
reference to any of the complex actions which may be requested of APT.
 I can not immediately think of any more useful replacement for the
warning as a whole, however suggestions are welcome.

Regards