"Cannot Get Lock" Displayed Over and Over Again From KPackagekit

[Jeremy LaCroix]

I am using Kubuntu Karmic 64-bit. I choose sometimes to upgrade my system manually through a terminal or a TTY, and today when I ran "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" I came back to my system and found over 20 KPackageKit errors waiting for me. (See screenshot). It seems to me that KPackageKit isn't able to see that I'm doing it manually.

[Neil Perry (nperry)]

Hello there,

Thanks for reporting this bug to us and for helping to make Kubuntu better. I've looked at your bug and it shouldn't come up with those ammount of messages while performing 'apt-get'. I've marked this bug as it effects the package 'kpackagekit'.

Awaiting for this to get confirmed by other users.

Many Thanks
Neil Perry

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

I can confirm this. To reproduce this issue I left aptitude running and at ~ 11:45 pm kpackagekit started checking for updates and I got the first message. After that kpackagekit retried the update-check every ~15min. Since the previous notification doesn't vanish they just start accumulating. While I'm writing this I have 6 kpackagkit notifications on my screen.

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: kpackagekit 0.4.2-0ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-10.36~eee3-generic
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-10-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin netdev plugdev sambashare

[sasha1024 (sasha1024)]

This also happens when synaptic is running.

IMHO, kpackagekit should display explicit error messages only when it was explicitly launched by user.
When kpackagekit is implicitly running (i.e. performing some background tasks, like checking for updates), it should not disturb the user with error messages.

[Scotty Rotten (scottscott)]

After leaving synaptic running for 24 hours, I logged into my desktop, and there are like 100 stacked kpackagekit error messages. The error messages were so much that the window manager disabled composite functionality. After closing all the windows, my desktop is unusable, it basically left me with nothing to do but reboot. I guess I could have restarted X.org from a ssh session, as I have the default ctl+alt+backspace disabled. Luckily alt+F2 worked and allowed me to issue a reboot command, which allowed me to restart the window manager without a full reboot.

This has to be the worst error handling I have ever seen, in any system (cept maybe the blue screen of death), and I think it is more than just a problem with kpackagekit. Instead of a single error console-like window to display errors, there are windows that get stacked off the screen, eventually consuming the system or window manager memory. This should NEVER happen, error messages are error messages, and should not allow a denial of service to the window manager.

Please escalate this to the KDE team, or who ever needs to know.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Fix committed for KPackageKit 0.5.1.1

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package kpackagekit - 0.5.4-0ubuntu2

---------------
kpackagekit (0.5.4-0ubuntu2) lucid; urgency=low

  * Switch to source format 3.0 (quilt)
  * Don't use the quilt dh addon. It was causing an FTBFS since there wasn't
    a build-depend on quilt and with source format 3.0 we don't need it
  * Remove unnecessary build-depend on cdbs
  * Bump build-depend version of pkg-kde-tools to support the earliest version
    that included the kde dh addon (0.5.0)
  * Bump required version of libpackagekit-qt-dev to 0.5.5 as specified by
    CMakeLists.txt
  * Bump the binary package's packagekit dependency to 0.5.5 as well
  * Replace dependency on kdebase-workspace-bin with polkit-kde-1, as it needs
    the polkit-1 stuff now
  * Bugs fixed in 0.5.x:
    LP: #256245, #434390, #458375, #460550, #486091, #458868, #460459
    LP: #460459, #460459
 -- Jonathan Thomas <email address hidden> Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:22:09 -0500