"Task cannot be monitored or controlled" alert is unhelpful and scary
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
aptdaemon (Ubuntu) |
Triaged
|
Low
|
Sebastian Heinlein |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: aptdaemon
While trying to install an application in the Ubuntu Software Center, an error alert appeared with this wording:
Task cannot be monitored or controlled
The connection to the daemon was lost.
Most likely the background daemon crashed
_
\/ Details
It seems that the daemon died.
xprop suggests that this alert belongs to software-center, but bug 438797 shows the same alert also appearing with update-manager, so I guess the alert is produced by aptdaemon. (If not, please move this report.) This bug report is not about any particular case when the alert appears, it is about the alert itself.
The alert does not satisfy any of the requirements of a good error message: it does not say what went wrong, it does not explain why it went wrong, and it does not say how to fix or work around the problem. It also uses the words "daemon", "crashed", and "died", none of which should appear in interfaces intended for ordinary people.
<https:/
Changed in aptdaemon (Ubuntu): | |
importance: | Undecided → Low |
Changed in aptdaemon (Ubuntu): | |
assignee: | nobody → Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) |
1. The Python aptdaemon client which is used by software-store and update-manager monitors the daemon. In the case of a crashed aptdaemon the client progress doesn't hang forever waiting for new signals from the daemon, but instead raises this error.
Actually we don't know very much about a possible error cause - only that the daemon unexpectedly disappeared from the D-Bus - this is the communication bus which is used to transfer information between the root running aptdaemon and the client on the user's desktop session.
2.In most cases we should know the purpose of the transaction - there is only a very rare cornor case in which we don't know anything about the transaction.But how should we make use of this and not make the life of translators harder?
3. The error is produced by the client, see 1
4. This is a serious error - or design oversight, see comment on #438797. Automatically requeuing the transaction could in most cases only reproduce the error.