Bug#600571: perl: Fails to complete unpack during installation

[Niko Tyni]

severity 600571 important
thanks

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 09:35:28AM +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 10:33:57AM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote:
> > Package: perl
> > Version: 5.10.1-15
> > Severity: serious
> > Justification: Breaks installation
> > 
> > While dist-upgrading my system today, the perl package failed to unpack/configure 
> > (transcript below) and hung for over an hour until I killed the dpkg process.  After 
> > running "dpkg --configure -a" and "apt-get -f install" the package then continued to 
> > configure correctly.  It looks like it was somehow stuck between unpacking and 
> > configuring.  There was no response in the terminal to any keys (I tried hitting enter, 
> > but there was no response to the input, so maybe apt-get was doing something odd with 
> > termios if this wasn't a deliberate action by the perl maintainer scripts).

> This is very weird. No, the maintainer scripts of the perl package
> certainly don't mess with ptys in any way and actually do nothing at
> the unpack stage of an upgrade. There are no conffiles and no debconf
> usage either.

> The package seems to work for other people (10 days in unstable without
> other reports) and the changes in 5.10.1-15 seem unlikely to cause
> something like this.
> 
> My best guess is that this is either a problem with your system or some
> corner case in apt-get / dpkg interaction but this is all just handwaving.
> 
> Tagging as unreproducible, let's wait a while for any other reports. The
> package just migrated to squeeze so there should be plenty of people
> upgrading in the next few days.

Now that we've seen 5.10.1-16 migrate to squeeze too after ten days in
unstable and no other reports of anything like this, I think it's clear
this is not an issue with the perl package.

I'm downgrading the severity so that RC bughunters can concentrate on other
things. TBH, I don't see much point in keeping the bug open at all.

Roger, please let me know if you're OK with closing this or if you want it
reassigned somewhere else. Personally I doubt the dpkg or apt maintainers
can do much about it either.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org