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

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo


Hi *,

2014-11-12 13:51 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)


I remember seeing this when happened in ~Oct 2014, but I haven't seen
any occurrence since then.

In the dpkg commit fixing #766758, it says:

  This is a mostly conformant workaround for frontends like apt that do
  not correctly call «dpkg --configure -a» or «dpkg --triggers-only -a»
  after their normal runs, and leave packages in triggers-pending and
  triggers-awaited states.

I am not sure if the front-ends are suppossed to be modified to call
dpkg correctly because this "conformant workaround" will be removed, or
what's the situation.  Can you please clarify, if you know the reply
right away?  If you have to dig no problem, I will do it.

Guillém (from dpkg) told me that it had been fixed in apt, and aptitude
only calls in one section "dpkg --configure -a", not individually "dpkg
--configure $pkg", so I think that it relies on apt for this task and so
there's nothing to do from aptitude's side.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>