Synaptic doesn't recover gracefully from error

[Corey Burger]

If you close synaptic while it is in the middle of updating packages, upon
opening synaptic again, it says "E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run
'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem." It expect it just to do the right
thing, ie, just say "Update interuptted, resuming at that point", with a dialog
that offered to cancel (as you could enter into an infinite loop, if the update
was crashing synaptic. Then it would continue the continue where it had been
interupted.

This happened on a Hoary-->Breezy update, but the problem would occur at any
point when it was interupted halfway through.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

How did you closed synaptic during the package install/removals? The close
button is deactivated and the only way to kill it is to use xkill or send a kill
signal.

[Corey Burger (corey.burger)]

Synaptic actually crashed, if I remember correctly.

[Corey Burger (corey.burger)]

Regardless of when it happened, crashes are probably going to happen, especially
right around upgrades. A general thought on this might be to set a flag when it
is shutdown properly. When it starts up again, if the flag is not set, it does
an integrity check and corrects any errors it finds.

[Gabriel Morales (accounts-gamoe)]

I got the update on the first run. I am running the Breezy Badger Preview
version. Though, to be fair, after running the indicated command, all was well
and I was able to update.

[Stephen Sinclair (radarsat1)]

I recently was using the update manager, which was running synaptic, which was running dpkg... due to my bad ram, dpkg got a random segfault. (it happens occasionally.. need to install badram one of these days)

Anyways, there was no way of nicely exiting synaptic, it was simply hung with a "dpkg error" in the terminal window. I couldn't even kill the dpkg process, so I rebooted. On doing so, I re-ran Update Manager and it said "Only one package manager may run at a time" or something like that. So I had to drop to a terminal and run apt-get, which told me that I had to run "dpkg --configure -a" to resume my previous update.

After running this dpkg command, my previous update continued and I was able to run Update Manager again. However, it would have been nice if Synaptic had simply popped a dialog saying, "Would you like to resume the previous update?" After all, apt-get tells me right there exactly what I needed to do in a terminal, so I don't see why Synaptic can't interpret that.

This situation was no sweat for me, but certainly less than obvious for the casual user.

[Carthik Sharma (carthik)]

Changing status to confirmed. Multiple confirmations.

[Tuomas Aavikko (taavikko)]

sorry for posting this old bug again. But the problem still persists.
It even doesn't need synaptic to occur. It can happen also when using "apt-get"

Least the error could be modified to include sudo "sudo dpkg --configure -a"
Ideal course of action would be automated process when occuring.

[Ajay (ajaygautam)]

Just ran into this issue.
I have ubuntu running in virtual box. The host OS ran out of memory while Update Manager was running. So, the system froze. Couldn't resume to had to kill the OS and restart.

When I ran update manager again, it presented me with this error.

Ideal solution: Update manager runs 'dpkg --configure -a" itself (It has the admin password already).