[Aptitude-devel] Bug#769222: Bug#769222: Bug#769222: aptitude: Frequent pending actions left

[David Kalnischkies]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 10:34:09AM +0100, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Cesare Leonardi wrote:
> > On three different PCs (Debian unstable, i386, 32 bit) i'm frequently
> > encountering a problem, where aptitude (curses interface), without any
> > error to the user, leaves some package in an incomplete state.
> [...]
> > I'm not sure, but i believe that this problem appeared after one of the
> > recent dpkg upgrade.
> 
> It's first got reported a few weeks ago. But since this is not the
> first report this week -- there was another one yesterday -- I suspect
> that some broken packages have been uploaded recently to Debian which
> break some commonly installed triggers.

The underlying problem is "breakage" in the interaction of dpkg and apt
in terms of triggers, see #766758.

The issue being that some triggers will stay pending/packages stay
awaiting after libapt is done calling dpkg. Following calls of apt tools
should report them as "half-installed" or similar such (depending on how
detailed you want to be. See also dpkg -C for a complete list). Usually,
as apt tools prefer to go from one good state to another the solution
should include finishing the installation of them (meaning, libapt will
call --configure on them). This might or might not get you into
a complete done state as some things are trigger-happy – in other words:
The completion of one trigger could trigger another trigger.


I haven't really decided (mostly thanks to time issues) yet how to tackle
this giant ball of pain and on top of that how to sell it to the Release
Team if I would find a fix from the apt side. As said in the mentioned
bugreport, that wouldn't help in any way with wheezy-upgrades though.


Still, we have no report against apt about this, but I am seeing
multiple for aptitude, so I suspect there is something more to it from
the aptitude side in how it deals with triggers, so I wouldn't advice to
just reassign them to apt/dpkg now without further inspection.

(it could just be that apt isn't really too talkative about
half-installed packages if encounter. It will just fix it up and mention
it as a single line in the usual what-we-will-do-summary stats and as
triggers are usually not too important for the operation of the system
nobody realizes that something is fishy, but I want you to check first)


Best regards

David Kalnischkies
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