Comment 14 for bug 979661
Revision history for this message
| Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote Re: [Bug 979661] Re: oneiric to precise: debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Gnome and falls back to Dialog | #14 |
On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 06:07:13PM -0000, Steve Langasek wrote:
> I quite agree, and I understand there's meant to be code already here
> to do that, which seems to be failing.
The current code for this in update-manager checks if DEBIAN_FRONTEND is
set to "gnome" without libgtk2-perl installed at the start of the
upgrade, and in that case it sets the frontend to "dialog" and expands
the terminal widget. However, what's happening here is that
libgtk2-perl gets temporarily deconfigured or removed during the
upgrade, probably due to a major Perl transition. There's no code in
update-manager to handle that case; it would have to keep an eye on the
terminal to notice attempts to read from it, and expand the terminal
widget then.
(Didn't synaptic or something use to do this, once upon a time?)