On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 10:34:09AM +0100, Axel Beckert wrote: > Cesare Leonardi wrote: > > On three different PCs (Debian unstable, i386, 32 bit) i'm frequently > > encountering a problem, where aptitude (curses interface), without any > > error to the user, leaves some package in an incomplete state. > [...] > > I'm not sure, but i believe that this problem appeared after one of the > > recent dpkg upgrade. > > It's first got reported a few weeks ago. But since this is not the > first report this week -- there was another one yesterday -- I suspect > that some broken packages have been uploaded recently to Debian which > break some commonly installed triggers.
The underlying problem is "breakage" in the interaction of dpkg and apt in terms of triggers, see #766758. The issue being that some triggers will stay pending/packages stay awaiting after libapt is done calling dpkg. Following calls of apt tools should report them as "half-installed" or similar such (depending on how detailed you want to be. See also dpkg -C for a complete list). Usually, as apt tools prefer to go from one good state to another the solution should include finishing the installation of them (meaning, libapt will call --configure on them). This might or might not get you into a complete done state as some things are trigger-happy – in other words: The completion of one trigger could trigger another trigger. I haven't really decided (mostly thanks to time issues) yet how to tackle this giant ball of pain and on top of that how to sell it to the Release Team if I would find a fix from the apt side. As said in the mentioned bugreport, that wouldn't help in any way with wheezy-upgrades though. Still, we have no report against apt about this, but I am seeing multiple for aptitude, so I suspect there is something more to it from the aptitude side in how it deals with triggers, so I wouldn't advice to just reassign them to apt/dpkg now without further inspection. (it could just be that apt isn't really too talkative about half-installed packages if encounter. It will just fix it up and mention it as a single line in the usual what-we-will-do-summary stats and as triggers are usually not too important for the operation of the system nobody realizes that something is fishy, but I want you to check first) Best regards David Kalnischkies
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