adept ask a question but not possible to answer

[Berti]

In a upgrade, adept ask a question such as "Please enter an integer between -20 and 19" but it is impossible to answer. I'm just able to clic on "cancel".

See the attached screenshot.

[Berti (bertrand-haut-gmail)]

Screenshot of the question which is not possible to answer

[mornfall (mornfall)]

This is a problem with the kde debconf frontend i believe, which is part of debconf package. Reassigning there.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

No, it's not a debconf bug either; debconf is just doing what it's told to do.

x11-common's config script asks x11-common/xwrapper/nice_value at priority low, and then if validation fails it asks x11-common/xwrapper/nice_value/error at priority critical and goes round the loop again. Firstly, if the user never saw the question in the first place (and the previously stored value is wrong for some reason), this is bizarre UI; secondly, it never bumps the priority after error so the user never gets an opportunity to enter a new value (although it does set a safe value, so it's probably just poor UI rather than an infinite loop).

I imagine that the xorg maintainers will have further questions to try to work out how things got into this state, though.

[Fabio Massimo Di Nitto (fabbione)]

This is really weird because before entering the loop we make sure that the value is safe.

# next question requires input validation; assume safe valid value already
# present (possibly the template default)
SAFE=
if db_get x11-common/xwrapper/nice_value; then
  SAFE="$RET"
fi

# make sure it's really safe; if not, use the default
if ! validate_nice_value "$RET"; then
  SAFE="0"
  run db_set x11-common/xwrapper/nice_value "$SAFE"
fi

and the loop of death..

anyway i am going to bump the priority in case of error. it seems the most sane thing to do anyway.

Fabio

[Fabio Massimo Di Nitto (fabbione)]

xorg (7.0.0-0ubuntu43) dapper; urgency=low

  * Kill possible loop when asking nice values.
  (Closes Ubuntu: #41976)