apt's daily cron job locks the apt lists against package managers

[Alex Mauer]

Binary package hint: apt

The cron job installed by apt (/etc/cron.daily/apt) runs apt-get -qq update. While this update is running, the apt lists directory is locked (/var/lib/apt/lists/lock exists). If the user attempts to run a package manager during this time, it won't be able to install packages.

Further, it appears that on my system this apt-get process sometimes hangs, leaving the directory locked until I kill apt-get manually (and sometimes, remove the lock manually as well)

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

If you have a case were it hangs, could you please run strace on it like this:
$ sudo strace -p `pidof apt-get`

and attach the output to this bugreport?

Thanks,
 Michael

[Alex Mauer (hawke)]

repeating:

select(18, [7 8 9 11 13 15 17], [], NULL, {0, 500000}) = 0 (Timeout)
stat64("/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_feisty_universe_binary-i386_Packages.decomp", 0xbf85feb0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)