Bug#758914: [dbus] Refuses to complete installation, blocking other pkgs

[Simon McVittie]

On 23/08/14 14:29, Bzzzz wrote:
> Hmm, -ba was refused (Failed to parse boot descriptor 'a') but -ab 
> was accepted (sounds normal from the man point of view) -
> journal.txt is attached.

Yes, my mistake, -ba is parsed as "messages from the boot named 'a'";
-ab or -a -b is "unabbreviated messages from this boot", which is what
I intended to ask for.

So, the root cause of your problems is that systemd is detecting (what
it thinks is) a serious problem and going into emergency repair mode:

> août 23 08:08:02 anubis systemd[1]: Expecting device 
> dev-sdg1.device...
...
> août 23 08:09:32 anubis systemd[1]: Job dev-sdg1.device/start
> timed out. août 23 08:09:32 anubis systemd[1]: Timed out waiting
> for device dev-sdg1.device. août 23 08:09:32 anubis systemd[1]:
> Dependency failed for /media/KEY. août 23 08:09:32 anubis
> systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Local File Systems. août 23
> 08:09:32 anubis systemd[1]: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies of
> local-fs.target. août 23 08:09:32 anubis systemd[1]: Dependency
> failed for File System Check on /dev/sdg1.
...
> août 23 08:09:32 anubis systemd[1]: Stopped target Basic System. 
> août 23 08:09:32 anubis systemd[1]: Stopped target System 
> Initialization.
...
> août 23 08:09:32 anubis systemd[1]: Starting Emergency Shell...

You have a line in your /etc/fstab or /etc/fstab.d/* for /dev/sdg1
(/media/KEY), which is not present, and is probably a USB flash drive
or something. Please tell us what that line is (before changing it).

Under sysvinit, if a required device in fstab is missing, the system
will try to muddle along without it; but systemd detects missing
devices, treats that as a serious problem and goes into emergency
mode. The solution is to add noauto and/or nofail to the mount options
for /dev/sdg1 and any other removable/non-essential devices, to tell
systemd that their absence is not really serious, and then leave
emergency mode with "systemctl default".

Getting out of emergency mode should return your system to a better
state. However, it might also be considered to be a bug that
installing packages that contain services, while in emergency mode,
doesn't work.

Under sysvinit, invoke-rc.d would start the service if it should be
running in the current runlevel, and ignore it if it should not. Under
systemd, invoke-rc.d will always try to start the service even if the
target that wants it is not active, and if that fails, invoke-rc.d
fails. systemd maintainers: do you think that's a bug in invoke-rc.d's
systemd support, or do you consider package installation while
sysinit.target is not active to be an unsupported action?

Regards,
    S