On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Ben Collins wrote: > > APT does not run dpkg in this case automatically because that command can > > cause an unexpected change in the users system, like configuring packages. > > If dpkg had some other command that only cleaned up after it crashed then > > APT could call that. > > And dpkg doesn't automatically cleanup after itself for pretty much the > same reason.
Er no. Most likely dpkg took a segfault so it couldn't clean up it's journal. dpkg was designed with the intent that it would never leave the updates directory dirty. It used to be that the only way it failed to do so is if it took a segfault or ram out of disk space. The cleanup for this is simply merging the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/updates into the status file and writing a new status file to disk. That is user transparent, calling dpkg --configure -a is not. In general, if a user sees that message from APT it means the last time they ran dpkg it died horribly, and 99% of those cases are bugs in dpkg. It does not show up for the common case of a package failing to install for any reason, or any other reason that would normally require --configure -a. The recommendation of --configure -a is only because it is a fairly harmless command that does sync up the journal. Jason
