[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#480552: fails to stop hald on upgrade...

[Bruce Sass]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.11-1
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks unrelated software

...which causes dpkg to err out, halting the upgrade process. Since
neither dpkg or upgrading explicitly depends on hal, its failure is
breaking unrelated software/processes.

Investigation reveals that /var/run/hal/hald.pid has disappeared, but
hald is still running. Manually recreating the PID file then
re-attempting to configure hal gets me the same result, specifically:

$ ps aux
...
111       1949  0.0  0.3   4964  1972 ?        Ss   May09   0:01 /usr/sbin/hald
...

$ cat > /var/run/hal/hald.pid
1949
[ctrl-d]

$ dselect
...
running dpkg --pending --configure ...
Setting up hal (0.5.11-1) ...
Reloading system message bus config...done.
Starting Hardware abstraction layer: haldinvoke-rc.d: initscript hal,
action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing hal (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 hal

dpkg --configure returned error exit status 1.
Press <enter> to continue.
  
$ ps aux
...
111       1949  0.0  0.3   4964  1972 ?        Ss   May09   0:01 /usr/sbin/hald
...

$ ls -l /var/run/hal
total 0

Most likely we are being bitten by a start-stop-daemon bug and you may
want to see how the exim Maintainer worked around the problem. IIRC,
you can not assume that start-stop-daemon (perhaps via invoke-rc.d)
will actually stop the process! s-s-d will send the signal, but it is
up to you to ensure the process has actually stopped before attempting
to restart it if starting will fail when the process is already running.

Note: on this system (1GHz PIII, 512M RAM) /usr is an NFS mount, which
is pretty much the only difference between it and the two other
systems where hal upgrades cleanly.

"killall hald" then "dpkg --configure --pending" works around
the problem.


- Bruce

P.S.
Starting Hardware abstraction layer: haldinvoke-rc.d: initscript hal,

should be

Starting Hardware abstraction layer: hald
invoke-rc.d: initscript hal,

i.e., you are missing a newline char somewhere


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-onegee (PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages hal depends on:
ii  adduser                      3.107       add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                         1.2.1-2     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  hal-info                     20080508-1  Hardware Abstraction Layer - fdi f
ii  libc6                        2.7-10      GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3                  1.2.1-2     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2             0.74-4      simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libexpat1                    1.95.8-4    XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libgcc1                      1:4.3.0-4   GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0                 2.16.3-2    The GLib library of C routines
ii  libhal-storage1              0.5.11-1    Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libhal1                      0.5.11-1    Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libsmbios1                   0.13.13-1   Provide access to (SM)BIOS informa
ii  libstdc++6                   4.3.0-4     The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libusb-0.1-4                 2:0.1.12-11 userspace USB programming library
ii  libvolume-id0                0.114-2     libvolume_id shared library
ii  lsb-base                     3.2-12      Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  mount                        2.13.1.1-1  Tools for mounting and manipulatin
ii  pciutils                     1:3.0.0-3   Linux PCI Utilities
ii  pm-utils                     1.1.0-1     utilities and scripts for power ma
ii  udev                         0.114-2     /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  usbutils                     0.73-7      Linux USB utilities

Versions of packages hal recommends:
ii  eject                         2.1.5-7    ejects CDs and operates CD-Changer
pn  libsmbios-bin                 <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information