Package: emacsen-common, markdown-mode Severity: important Tags: security On one of my machines I run in a situation there deb package installation wasn't possible any more.
The reason was that installation of a emacs companion packge – in my case markdown-mode – was hanging forever, without reporting any hint what was triggering this problem. I debuged the situation and found that the following statement is running forever. > `emacs24 -q -batch -l package --eval (add-to-list 'package-directory-list > "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/elpa-src") -f package-initialize -f > batch-byte-compile markdown-mode-autoloads.el markdown-mode-pkg.el > markdown-mode.el` I tried to manual execute the statement above and have seen now the message: > Wrote /root/.breadcrumb …ing-c-adaptive-history locked by root@vt-xenia… (pid > 5423): (s, q, p, ?)? After seeing this the mitigation was simple: Just start emacs as „interactive editor“ and process the same question shown up. Why is this a serious problem ? The answer is: - No hint what is going wrong is visible. - Aborting (e.g. reboot) may end up in a the following problem: > E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to > correct the problem. - In this case any further updates (including security related) may be blocked until resolution. (That why I tagged it as security problem.) - It is not resolvable by a 'purge and reinstall' mitigation.
