Comment 33 for bug 349469

There is no shortage of duplicates of this report. I am inclined to guess that in many cases faulty package scripts are leaving processes around which fail to release the config.dat lock under some circumstances.

In order to test this hypothesis I'd like to go back in time and in each of the 400-odd cases find the rogue process and then figure out why it's running on the user's system. Obviously that's impossible. But perhaps we will have chances to do this in the future.

I certainly don't think that the *majority* of cases has arisen from a package management command being run from a terminal while another package management process runs. I was just asking in #30 whether or not there are higher-level locks that should be taken by such commands, resulting in earlier and more useful error messages. It seems not. In that case I'd say that for now the error message ("debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable") should be extended to give some advice about how to fix the problem... and possibly also to ask for information to be contributed here.