[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#540506: hal breaks the whole system: connection refused

[Norbert Preining]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.13-2
Severity: critical

Updating, or reinstalling 0.5.13-2 of the hal packages completely
hoses my whole system:
- keyboard is gone
- /dev seems to be gone

When reinstalling I get:
Reloading system message bus config...Failed to open connection to "system" message bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: Connection refused
invoke-rc.d: initscript dbus, action "force-reload" failed.
Starting Hardware abstraction layer: haldinvoke-rc.d: initscript hal, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing hal (--install)
...

Wonderful.

It might be that concoction of insserv that is playing a role here, since
when I tried to login in single user mode the PATH of root didn't contain
/usr/sbin, and several other strange things occurred while shutting down.

Then, even better, calling halt from single user mode didn't do a proper
shutdown, on next reboot:
	/dev/sda3 contains a file system with errors, check forced.
Even better.

That is a *real* pain.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.2
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_IE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_IE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash