tzdata fails to upgrade

[Chris Savery]

Binary package hint: tzdata

Just ran upgrade today on Maverick and getting this result,
...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/tzdata_2011g-0ubuntu0.10.10_all.deb (--unpack):
 unable to create `/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Manaus.dpkg-new' (while processing `./usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Manaus'): Invalid argument
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/tzdata_2011g-0ubuntu0.10.10_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Has thrown my system into a total mess now as when I try to fix this with "apt-get -f install" apt-get wants to remove hundreds of packages requiring a type in confirmation. I'm trying to "hold" tzdata at tzdata-2011e but cannot do that and cannot upgrade anything else because of this failure. What's causing this and how to fix. I had a fully working system this morning until i tried to upgrade today.

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hi Chris. Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 614587, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Chris Savery (chrissavery)]

I s that really the same bug? This is a completely different pkg version and the upgrade fails during unpacking the pkg rather than in a post-processing step.

After trying to get this pkg to upgrade for several hours I was forced to give up and leave my system in it's current state. I realized that whatever causes this is dependent on conditions that aren't universal. The same upgrade was processed fine on my desktop system but on this server install it fails, no matter how I try to work around it, or re-download the pkg. I even manually downloaded the pkg from Launchpad and used dpkg to manually install it but had the same results - the only difference being that it failed on a different country record (not America/Manaus).

I've tried to make sure this isn't something else wrong on my system. It's definitely not out-of-space or lack of permissions (using sudo).

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hi Chris, indeed this does not look like a dupe of that bug. My apologies, I was too quick in making that determination. I'll remove the dupe status now.

[Narcis Garcia (narcisgarcia)]

Steps reproduced by me today:

1. Create a Live-USB (with persistent space)

2. Update packages with update-manager (includes tzdata)

Next try to copy messages:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ env LANGUAGE=en sudo apt-get install tzdata
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  tzdata
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 69 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/658 kB of archives.
After this operation, 32,8 kB disk space will be freed.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
(Reading database ... 136370 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace tzdata 2011f-1 (using .../tzdata_2011g-0ubuntu0.11.04_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement tzdata ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/tzdata_2011g-0ubuntu0.11.04_all.deb (--unpack):
 error creating hard link `./usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Nicosia': Invalid argument
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess paste was killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/tzdata_2011g-0ubuntu0.11.04_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

[Narcis Garcia (narcisgarcia)]

Now cannot remove tzdata:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ env LANGUAGE=en sudo apt-get purge tzdata
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libsdl1.2debian : Depends: libsdl1.2debian-alsa (= 1.2.14-6.1ubuntu3) but it is not going to be installed or
                            libsdl1.2debian-all (= 1.2.14-6.1ubuntu3) but it is not going to be installed or
                            libsdl1.2debian-esd (= 1.2.14-6.1ubuntu3) but it is not going to be installed or
                            libsdl1.2debian-oss (= 1.2.14-6.1ubuntu3) but it is not going to be installed or
                            libsdl1.2debian-nas (= 1.2.14-6.1ubuntu3) but it is not installable or
                            libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (= 1.2.14-6.1ubuntu3) but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

[Raphaël Hertzog (hertzog)]

What kernel (version & package) do you use? What is the version of libc6 on your system? What is the version of dpkg?

The error messages is strange, it indicates that a simple open() call failed with EINVAL which is documented this way:
EINVAL The implementation does not support synchronized I/O for this file.
EINVAL The value of the oflag argument is not valid.

And the flags for the open call are simple:
fd = open(fnamenewvb.buf, (O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_WRONLY), 0);

The problem is probably not at the dpkg level, it must be lower in the stack, libc6 or kernel. Maybe a security module is behaving badly?

[Raphaël Hertzog (hertzog)]

Hum, my former comment applied to #807619 which I marked as a dupe, this report has the same failure mode but on the link() call and this call is not even documented to be able to return EINVAL.

[SEWilco (scot-wilcoxon)]

In dupe bug 807619, I reported:

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS
Release: 10.04

$ uname -a
Linux (system-name-redacted) 2.6.32-305-ec2 #9-Ubuntu SMP Thu Apr 15 08:05:38 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ apt-cache policy libc6 dpkg
libc6:
  Installed: 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8
  Candidate: 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8
  Version table:
 *** 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.11.1-0ubuntu7.7 0
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/main Packages
     2.11.1-0ubuntu7 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages
dpkg:
  Installed: 1.15.5.6ubuntu4.5
  Candidate: 1.15.5.6ubuntu4.5
  Version table:
 *** 1.15.5.6ubuntu4.5 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates/main Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.15.5.6ubuntu4 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages

The root filesystem has 60% in use, and all the others are less than 2% in use, so it's not a device full situation.

[Yaron (sh-yaron)]

Have you tried using the Debian packages?

Are you still having this issue?

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

tzdata no longer ships hardlinks, so whatever mysterious failure this was wouldn't be reproducible. Closing the bug.