Comment 3 for bug 320222

Revision history for this message
Michele Mangili (mangilimic) wrote : Re: [Bug 320222] Re: _cache->open() failed, please report.

Roger Binns wrote:
> My complaint is about the message appearing in the first place and why
> the whole package/update system doesn't just self heal instead of
> spitting out a message that only the geekiest can understand.

I understand your complaint. I think that this issue doesn't belong to
the update manager, but it should be handled by dpkg. As a matter of
fact update-manager uses dpkg in order to keep the system updated, and
the message you got was outputted by dpkg, not update-manager.

In many cases running 'dpkg --configure -a' doesn't solve the issue. For
example see bug #324252. For this reason I don't know if it is bug or a
feature of dpkg, however I agree that this message is almost
incomprehensible to an inexperienced user.

Anyway I'm not a developer of Ubuntu so... let's wait for a comment of a
more experienced user than me!

> Also note
> that it is a security issue. The user's system was set to automatically
> update. She just ran the update manager out of curiosity to discover
> that she was over a hundred updates behind and the obscure message with
> the request to report it.
>

On the other hand this issue should be handled by update-manager, which
may alert the user about missing updates.

For this reason I suggest you should change the description of this
report and ask to implement this missing feature in update-manager.

Thank you.