[Aptitude-devel] Bug#862714: system upgrade stopped, chiken-egg problem?

[Julian Andres Klode]

Control: reassign -1 aptitude

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 09:03:55AM +0200, Arturo Borrero Gonzalez wrote:
> Package: libapt-pkg5.0
> Version: 1.4.1
> Severity: normal
> 
> Dear apt team,
> 
> thanks for your work, it's really apreciated :-)
> 
> Today, I was doing an 'aptitude upgrade' in a server running stretch testing,
> which was a bit outdated.
> 
[...]
> Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.24-9) ...
> dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
> Failed to perform requested operation on package.  Trying to recover:
> dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
> E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
> E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?
> E: Could not regain the system lock!  (Perhaps another apt or dpkg is running?)
> E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
> E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

Thanks for the bug report. There is a known race condition between
dpkg and apt tools, but I think we mostly worked around that for
now in apt.

The real fix for this is:

 https://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2017/01/msg00044.html

But that requires changes basically everywhere. Once that is solved
on the dpkg side, we can fix stuff elsewhere. That is tracked in
Bug #850417.

Reassigning to aptitude for now, as maybe aptitude does not do
its best to reduce the race as much as possible (keep the lock
until just before DoInstall(), and lock again once that is
done).

If it does, I guess we should probably reassign to dpkg and
forcemerge with 850417.

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