Ubuntu
man-db package

package man-db 2.6.5-2 failed to install/upgrade: error writing to '<standard output>': Input/output error

Bug #1241319 reported by Alex Goertzen on 2013-10-18

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #1372673: excessive debconf use when triggered. Edit Remove

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	man-db (Ubuntu)	New	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

While attempting to upgrade to 13.10, system crashed and would not boot. Ran repair, and was able to boot. The error message occurred during the first boot after repair.

ProblemType: Package
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: man-db 2.6.5-2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-12.19-generic 3.11.3
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Oct 17 22:09:03 2013
DuplicateSignature: package:man-db:2.6.5-2:error writing to '<standard output>': Input/output error
ErrorMessage: error writing to '<standard output>': Input/output error
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-01-08 (282 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Release i386 (20121017.1)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: man-db
Title: package man-db 2.6.5-2 failed to install/upgrade: error writing to '<standard output>': Input/output error
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-10-18 (0 days ago)

Tags:

Revision history for this message

Alex Goertzen (alexgoertzen) wrote on 2013-10-18:

AptOrdering.txt Edit (61.8 KiB, text/plain; charset="utf-8")
Dependencies.txt Edit (798 bytes, text/plain; charset="utf-8")
Df.txt Edit (458 bytes, text/plain; charset="utf-8")
Dmesg.txt Edit (48.0 KiB, text/plain; charset="utf-8")
DpkgHistoryLog.txt Edit (66.6 KiB, text/plain; charset="utf-8")
DpkgTerminalLog.txt Edit (476 bytes, text/plain; charset="utf-8")

Apport retracing service (apport) on 2013-10-18

tags:

removed: need-duplicate-check

Revision history for this message

Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote on 2014-09-23:

Thanks for your report. The basic problem here is that man-db's trigger uses debconf to decide whether to update the manual page database, but debconf is not always reliably usable in triggers. I finally figured out a simple way to avoid this problem, which I'm tracking as bug 1372673. If you are still affected by this locally (which I realise is unlikely in the case of some of the older bugs of this type), then running "sudo dpkg --configure -a && sudo apt-get -f install" in a terminal should normally be enough to get the package management system back to a sensible state.