[Pkg-salt-team] Bug#722446: Bug#722446: salt-minion: Salt minion unable to update salt

[Joe Healy]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 4:51 PM, martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> wrote:
> also sprach Joe Healy <joehealy at gmail.com> [2013.09.11.0815 +0200]:
>> Running:
>>
>> salt '*' pkg.install salt-minion
>>
>> will result in the minion (and the dpkg) process being killed part
>> way through the upgrade and requiring manual interverntion.
>
> Isn't this a fundamental problem in Salt, which should be fixed
> there? I don't think that using at(1) for this is really a solution,
> but a gross hack, which still requires the admin to know what's
> going on and to wait up to 1:59 minutes.

I agree using at (and this) is a hack.

The principle I was working off when doing the original update of the
init.d script was that /etc/init.d/salt-minion stop should stop the
minion and all child processes. I still think this is the right thing.

Doing this has ended up in a situation where it is difficult to
upgrade the minion without manually going around to each one.

I agree with the point about it being fixed in salt. I think they
should probably handle signals differently when they are updating
packages (maybe even a special case for salt itself).

In the end I decided that it was best to relax the killing all
processes until this can be resolved properly. Ending up in a
situation where each minion needs "dpkg --configure -a && apt-get -f
install" to be run manually after someone seemed to be the worst
situation possible.

I'm yet to file a bug upstream, but will do so.

In the mean time, I have already uploaded a package with the change
reverted. I believe it would be possible for me to either stop that
package (possibly dcut).

If you have any advice, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Joe