confusing messages when installation fails due to ENOSPC

[Samium Gromoff]

There are at least the following bugs here:

1. apt says:
  After unpacking 434kB of additional disk space will be used.
  Get:1 http://ru.archive.ubuntu.com feisty/universe hibernate 1.94-2 [86.1kB]
  Fetched 86.1kB in 0s (4366kB/s)
  E: Archive is too short
  E: Prior errors apply to /var/cache/apt/archives/hibernate_1.94-2_all.deb
This message fails to mention the lack of disk space.

2. debconf: apt-extracttemplates failed: Bad file descriptor(Reading database ... 109935 files and directories currently installed.)

This is a bug in debconf which is probably trying to read from fd -1 after failing to notice that open failed.

3.
Unpacking hibernate (from .../hibernate_1.94-2_all.deb) ...
dpkg-deb (subprocess): short read in buffer_copy (failed to write to pipe in copy)
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste returned error exit status 2
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/hibernate_1.94-2_all.deb (--unpack):
 short read in buffer_copy (backend dpkg-deb during `./usr/share/hibernate/scriptlets.d/network')

This is a very opaque way of saying "this .deb is corrupted - specifically, it is truncated".

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

The dpkg messages are not likely to be fixed until the unfortunate doogieism fd_buffer_copy et al is removed and replaced with something sensible.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The debconf error is just debconf using $! to report the failure of apt-extracttemplates when it should have used $?. I.e. it's a random uninteresting errno from somewhere previously that shouldn't have been reported.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!