Comment 3 for bug 932677

This is a valid setting in the config file:

exchange_interval =

However, if you parse the config file and try passing the value (empty string) to landscape-config on the command line, it will cause landscape-config to have an error.

root@ip-10-126-51-3:~# landscape-config --exchange-interval ""
Usage: landscape-config [options]

landscape-config: error: option --exchange-interval: invalid integer value: ''

At this point, if using dpkg-reconfigure, client.conf will be left in a half-written state and the package will be broken until you either reinstall or dpkg-reconfigure --force.

This does not happen with most other settings. The following command line works just fine:

landscape-config --computer-title "" --account-name "" --registration-password "" --http-proxy "" --https-proxy "" --silent --no-start

I am thinking the way to fix this is to fix the landscape-config command line parsing. Once this is done, the valid empty string in debconf will not cause an issue. This type of error can happen for the three integer arguments landscape-config accepts - exchange-interval, urgent-exchange-interval and ping-interval. I think these settings were added recently because of load testing.