Selecting "start a new shell to examine..." then closing the shell caused update to freeze

[Richard Hansen]

This bug was started by an automated bug reporting thing. I'm not 100% sure what happened, as this was during an upgrade from Gutsy to Hardy and a lot was going on.

At some point during the upgrade, a dialog box popped up asking what I wanted to do about dovecot.conf. I chose to view the differences and determined that I wanted to do a manual merge. After hitting Next, it took me back to the list of options. Since there is no "manually merge the files" option, I chose "start a new shell to examine the situation". It dropped me into a root shell inside the embedded terminal in the distribution upgrade application with no instructions (nothing like "Edit /tmp/dovecot.conf.new to your liking, then exit the shell."). Not knowing what I should do, I hit Ctrl-D to log out of the shell. At this point, both the distribution upgrade application and debconf were frozen. The distribution upgrade application was still redrawing when something would obscure the window and then move away, but debconf did not redraw.

I got to a terminal, did 'ps -ef' and looked around for what might be happening. This is what I remember seeing, which could be wrong: The distribution upgrade application had a child process: debconf. The debconf process had its own child process: ucf. The ucf process said "<defunct>" next to it in the 'ps -ef' output. I tried 'sudo kill -9 <pid_of_defunct_ucf>' but nothing happened. I then killed the debconf process and the upgrade app sprang back to life saying that something had exited with an error. I hit OK and the upgrade continued as if no problem had occurred.

At the very end of the upgrade, an automated bug reporting thing popped up. Actually, three bug reporting dialog boxes popped up: one for dovecot ("package dovecot-common 1:1.0.10-1ubuntu5 failed to install/upgrade: "), one for update-manager ("package update-manager 1:0.87.24 failed to install/upgrade: ErrorMessage: SystemError in cache.commit(): E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)"), and one for nautilus ("nautilus crashed with SIGSEGV"). After clicking "report" for all three, I got the following message in a dialog box: "Could not install the upgrades. The upgrade aborts now. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a)." I hit OK and the distribution upgrade app closed.

ProblemType: Package
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Apr 23 22:54:38 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ErrorMessage:
 ErrorMessage: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 143
NonfreeKernelModules: openafs nvidia
Package: dovecot-common 1:1.0.10-1ubuntu5
PackageArchitecture: i386
SourcePackage: dovecot
Title: package dovecot-common 1:1.0.10-1ubuntu5 failed to install/upgrade:
Uname: Linux 2.6.22-14-generic i686

[Richard Hansen (rhansen)]

Adding stuff from /var/log/dist-upgrade

[Mathias Gug (mathiaz)]

Thanks for you bug report. I'm reassigning it to update-manager.

Although the package that failed to install is dovecot, there seems to be an issue with update-manager, debconf and ucf. I've seen similar bug reports in the samba package (failed to install/upgrade) which also use ucf to manage configuration files.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Marking as triaged: there is enough data to follow up on the issue.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

The relevant error was
----
Setting up dovecot-common (1:1.0.10-1ubuntu5) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/init.d/dovecot ...
]30;placeborhansen@placebo /
#
# exit
Terminated
dpkg: error processing dovecot-common (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 143

This was a while ago, is it still an issue ?

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

triaged too fast. Reassigning to update-manager.

[Maarten Bezemer (veger)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running apport-collect 221269 and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for update-manager (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]