You have been subscribed to a public bug by Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur):
Binary package hint: hyperspec
System version:
bash$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS
Release: 10.04
Package version:
hyperspec 1.28
Problem description:
When installing the hyperspec package via aptitude from a machine that
cannot access the required download URL, the setup script does not
correctly handle the failure to download HyperSpec-7-0.tar.gz. (In my
case I was behind a firewall and I hadn't told it about the proxy server
e.g via environment variables.)
There appears to be logic in the postinst script to ask the user if they
want to continue after a failed download (I assume this is what
"db_input medium hyperspec/tryagain" should do), but this is not being
triggered for me, and so the download is attempted repeatedly without
end. I expected it to either ask me if I wanted to continue, to try a
different URL (e.g. using HTTP which my firewall would have allowed), or
to stop trying and inform me of how to work around the problem manually.
Effects:
This stops the installation of this package from being able to complete,
along with that of other packages that may be being installed at the
same time. It also prevents graceful termination of aptitude and dpkg,
which in my case caused me to also run into bug #349469. It was also
very difficult to stop the repeated downloading: Ctrl-C at the terminal
repeatedly had no effect, so in the end I killed aptitude with SIGTERM
from another shell. Doing so left apt/dpkg in a state that raised
various errors when I tried to use aptitude again (namely "Could not get
lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock", "dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run
'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem" and "debconf:
DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another
process").
Cleaning up after this was complex: I had to remove /var/lib/dpkg/lock
and kill the process identified by "sudo fuser -v
/var/cache/debconf/config.dat" (as per #349469), before I could run
"sudo dpkg --configure -a". This last step would then try the download
again, unless I manually left the downloaded file at
/root/tmp/HyperSpec-7-0.tar.gz and gave it *non-root* owner and group.
I have attached a copy of terminal output that demonstrates the problem
occurring. I have also marked this as a security vulnerability, as this
bug could (accidentally or deliberately) cause aptitude to become
unavailable for other users/processes, thereby preventing security
updates from being applied to the system.
** Affects: hyperspec (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
--
Installer loops forever retrying failed download
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/683240
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