[Debconf-devel] Bug#425397: tasksel/pkgsel causing Etch netboot install to hang indefinitely

[Adrian Bridgett]

Well I believe I've reached the bottom of one problem.  It appears
that when kicked off through a preseed install, DEBCONF_REDIR and file
descriptor 3 (hereafter FD3) are set.

These are set all the way down the stack upto and including apt-get.
However when apt-get runs dpkg-preconfigure, FD3 is no where to be
seen.  I put a "sleep" right at the top of dpkg-preconfigure and I
still couldn't see it - so I'm fairly sure that apt-get is not passing
FD3 though.

As a gross hack workaround (which might break god knows what else)
I've edited /usr/share/debconf/confmodule to unset DEBCONF_REDIR if
/proc/$$/fd/3 does not exist.

I now no longer get the confmodule line 42: 3: Bad file descriptor
error messages :-)

However, I still get some hangs (one I've seen before). In this case,
dpkg-preconfigure is sat in a waitpid(pidof /tmp/postfix.config...)
whilst postfix.config is sat reading STDIN (which is FD#8 from the
dpkg-preconfigure.  There is a dpkg-preconfigure zombie process
between these two.

HTH

Adrian
-- 
Email: adrian at smop.co.uk  -*-  GPG key available on public key servers
Debian GNU/Linux - the maintainable distribution   -*-  www.debian.org