[Debconf-devel] Bug#439763: Workaround insufficient (Debconf hangs on packages installed with late_command)

[Matthew Palmer]

Turns out I was wrong to say that using pkgsel/include was a sufficient
workaround -- there's too much stuff that Puppet does to make installing all
those packages in pkgsel/include practical.

I have, however, gotten a puppetless reproduction method.  Just set
preseed/late_command to something like:

apt-get install -y postfix

And the hang will magically present itself.  The symptoms I'm getting are
that the config script is trying to read from fd 0, which is a pipe to an fd
in dpkg-preconfigure, but dpkg-preconfigure is in wait4() on the config
script.

One interesting data point is that the problem seems to be restricted to
packages that use Perl for their config scripts.  Installing less or
ssl-certs, for instance, doesn't hang, but postfix does.  It might not
actually be a perl vs shell problem (I'm sure Postfix's config script is
more complicated than less') but since it happens at dpkg-preconfigure time,
I doubt it can be something like attempting to start a daemon or something
like that.

- Matt