package man-db 2.6.0.2-2 failed to install/upgrade: ErrorMessage: subprocess installed post-installation script was killed by signal (Terminated)

[Captain Chaos]

The installation of man-db failed when upgrading my Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit install to 11.04. It hung at "Processing triggers for man-db..." in the terminal view. I waited for ten minutes, but it did not progress, and there was no CPU or harddisk activity. I had to kill -9 the man-db.postinst process to continue (it did not respond to a regular kill).

The installation then progressed, but then aborted at the end of installing the upgrades with "Could not install the upgrades/The upgrade has aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a)."

The update then aborted without doing the "clean up" step, so I have no idea what state my system is in now. I haven't rebooted yet to see if it will boot.

The upgrade process should definitely be more robust when there are failures, instead of just quitting and leaving the user to figure out what the hell has happened and what state his system is in!

ProblemType: Package
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: man-db 2.6.0.2-2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-12.51-generic 2.6.38.8
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-12-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Nov 23 17:19:20 2011
ErrorMessage: ErrorMessage: subprocess installed post-installation script was killed by signal (Terminated)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
SourcePackage: man-db
Title: package man-db 2.6.0.2-2 failed to install/upgrade: ErrorMessage: subprocess installed post-installation script was killed by signal (Terminated)
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-11-23 (0 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. The basic problem here is that man-db's trigger uses debconf to decide whether to update the manual page database, but debconf is not always reliably usable in triggers. I finally figured out a simple way to avoid this problem, which I'm tracking as bug 1372673. If you are still affected by this locally (which I realise is unlikely in the case of some of the older bugs of this type), then running "sudo dpkg --configure -a && sudo apt-get -f install" in a terminal should normally be enough to get the package management system back to a sensible state.