[feature request] better handling of broken installations and/or ncurses interfaces

[Markus Thielmann]

A few external packages ask for accepting additional agreements. Most times, it's a ncurses interfaces, which is hidden in GDebi by default.

You'll find quite a few questions on Ubuntu answers and Google regarding corrupt installations due to impatient users closing the installation window.

See https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdebi/+question/7135 for example:

When installing VirtualBox, a text based interfaces asks for accepting their license file. As the graphical installer hides this window in some kind of "pull-down window" the user had overlooked that the package wasn't fully installed when closing the window. After the window was closed, the temporary installation package was deleted.

The package management knew the installation wasn't finished, but couldn't find the original package.

I'm not sure how to handle such situation in a better way. Until there's a better "automatic repair" function in dkpg, it might be a good idea to show the terminal output in GDebi by default.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

The support for recovery in update-manager got improved quite a bit. Most of the common problem (broken packages, broken packages with reqreinst from dpkg, ..) should be handled automatically now.

I'm suprised that a lot of people do get prompts in the terminal window. We set the DEBIAN_FRONTEND=gnome in gdebi, that means that the gnome/gtk frontend is used when debconf questions (like licensing) are asked.

[Luca Falavigna (dktrkranz)]

Fixed in 0.2.5ubuntu1