"waiting for service to start" text in pending operations is misleading

[Caleb]

Binary package hint: software-center

For whatever technical reason, Software Center has to wait for previous operations to complete before it begins downloading for the next operation. If an installation is running and another is queued up, the second task shows the text "waiting for service to start." While this may be true, it's too technical, and may lead users to believe that something is wrong with the system. If it's just waiting for a previous operation to complete, then it should say so with more informative text.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Oct 6 00:53:02 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: software-center 0.4.5
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.38-generic
SourcePackage: software-center
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-11-generic x86_64
XsessionErrors:
 (gnome-settings-daemon:1341): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (gnome-settings-daemon:1341): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (nautilus:1397): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:1415): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
 (nautilus:1889): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

What information would you expect? "Waiting for the completion of a previous task"?

[Caleb (caleb-marcus)]

Yes, that's pretty much what I'd expect to see.

[VaugKBs (sutherlandvaughn)]

There are two problems I find with the Software Center: (1) The page with departments will load and disappear (2) Waiting for other programs to complete, which will not load or you cannot see the loading process as it is not activated. I also so believe there are breech in computer security every time you download a software by entering your password. When you load a software and it become inactive there could also be other activity that is occuring to the operating system of individuals computer to disable the system. Individuals who are downloading the software are testers. We are isolating which software work and which do not work. it is for the development of the Ubuntu community.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter?action=recall&rev=297#installing> said: "If the item is queued waiting for other activities to complete, the status text for the item should be set to “Waiting”." That's for the general case where it's waiting for a previous Ubuntu Software Center task.

I've just updated this so that if it's waiting for another package manager in particular, it should say (for example) "Waiting for Synaptic to exit". <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter?action=diff&rev2=298&rev1=297> Sebastian, is that possible?

VaugKBs, please report individual bugs in separate bug reports.

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

Right, this is possible and a very good idea!

The following short code snippet would return the command name of the application which holds the lock.

import os
import fnctl
import struct

flk = struct.pack('hhQQi', fcntl.F_WRLCK, os.SEEK_SET, 0, 0, 0)

fd = open("/var/lib/dpkg/lock", "r")
pid = struct.unpack("hhQQi", fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_GETLK, flk))[5]
fd.close()flk = struct.pack('hhQQi', fcntl.F_WRLCK, os.SEEK_SET, 0, 0, 0)

fd_cmd = open("/proc/%s/cmdline" % pid, "r")
command = fd_cmd.readline()
fd_cmd.close()

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

The example above isn't correct. But implemented this feature in my local branch.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Thanks Sebastian, you're a star.

Does it give an application name (e.g. "Waiting for Add/Remove Applications to exit"), or just a process name (e.g. "Waiting for gnome-app-install to exit")? If it's just the process name at the moment, maybe we need a library function that will map a process name to the equivalent application name and icon where there is one. In the future, gnome-system-monitor etc could use that function as well.

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

It only shows the process name, but to be honest there aren't many applications which could lock the apt cache.

synaptic, apt-get, aptitude: Application name and process name are the same, except uppercase

packagekit: we could add a manual override for the process aptBackend.py. We cannot detect the frontend which tiggered the PackageKit action without a lot of work.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Ubuntu Software Center 2.1.19 is still showing "Waiting for service to start" for everything that isn't first in the queue. So I think either aptdaemon is returning STATUS_SETTING_UP when it should be returning STATUS_WAITING, or the value of STATUS_SETTING_UP should be "Waiting" just like STATUS_WAITING is.

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

This was a bug in aptdaemon. Fixed in rev. 498

[callMeTom (almighty-spork)]

To get this working again on my system I had to do
remove the CD-ROM from my Apt sources and then
$sudo apt-get upgrade --fix-broken
After reboot all is well.

Just thought I would pass that along since I hadn't seen anyone else who said to try that to make this work again.

-Tom

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

Caleb, since ubuntu 10.10 is released and I guess the version of aptdaemon that fixes this issue should be in 10.10 already so is this still an issue?

[Caleb (caleb-marcus)]

Nope, it's better now.