xulrunner never fully installs

[quequotion]

Binary package hint: xulrunner-1.9.1, xulrunner-1.9.2

xulrunner never finishes installing... it gives a configuration message and stops there forever.

If I killall xulrunner-bin, the rest of the installation process goes on, but it breaks xulrunner, firefox, yelp, desktopcouch, and several other packages depending on what's installed at the time.

apport claims (at the end of dist-upgrade, after killing xulrunner-bin) that it will NOT log anything as this is the result of a "previous failure" of which I also find no logging.... this is interesting for me because I've never actually seen a message from apport appear while not using apport...

I have attempted to compensate by forced purge of xulrunner and all dependent packages, but that doesn't seem like a decent solution to me.

Which reminds me: xulrunner cannot be removed either, except by dpkg with --force-all. Otherwise it tries to configure itself to infinity again.

[quequotion (quequotion)]

Am I totally alone with this problem?

I have a little more information. xulrunner-1.9.1 is a dependency of firefox 3.5.x, so it is possible to avoid the problem by simply never upgrading past firefox 3.0.x

Finally I've gone back to Jaunty (there are just too many issues with my setup and karmic to even consider an upgrade again) and I have avoided firefox 3.5 since reinstallation. During a previous reinstallation however, I noticed exactly the same problem as I had in Karmic: xulrunner-1.9.1 will never finish installing (it left it running all day...)

Furthermore, the process is always in sleep or wait status, giving me the impression that it's hoping for some kind of trigger to go off but it never comes.

I still have no log information regarding the issue, but I found an interesting tidbit on phoronix just now:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ext4_btrfs_nilfs2&num=2

It seems ext4 is quite slow with sql databases. My system is installed on an ext4 formatted RAID:0.

Could this be the route of the problem?

[quequotion (quequotion)]

Still no response... is nobody else having this problem? It happens to me in clean installs consistently. It happens in Jaunty and Karmic.

Steps to reproduce:
1. install ubuntu
2. upgrade xulrunner to 1.9.1

I found a workaround, but I don't like it.

I commented out some of the conditionals in the postinst script, effectively forcing actions to be taken regardless of the reason postinst was called. I suppose the best way to do this would be to download the deb, extract it, change the script, repack and then install; but it works just as well to install xulrunner, fail, edit the script from dpkg/info/, and then install again.

I am at work at the moment, so I will post the modified file when I get home.

[quequotion (quequotion)]

Here we go:
/var/lib/dpkg/info/xulrunner-1.9.1.postinst

I just commented out a few "if" statements and things seem to be working fine now, although I am a little worried about what might happen in the future. New installs seem to overwrite the postinst script with another that doesn't work..

I don't know if the reason the script fails is in the script itself, or the conditions of those "if" statements not getting met, but either way it should do something other than silently fail and wait until infinity for the script to terminate...

[quequotion (quequotion)]

This is still happening to me. Every time I update xulrunner. Every time.

[quequotion (quequotion)]

Why doesn't anyone reply?!

Is anyone even the least bit interested in this problem? It is a very serious issue for me. I'm a little shocked no one has even asked me for further detail or recommended some way to log this error..... (it does't seem to log anywhere by the way.. I've checked the logs for apt, dpkg, and syslog).

It affects ALL versions of xulrunner since 1.9.1. It affects ALL versions of Ubuntu since Jaunty.

I had the same problem when I upgraded to Lucid.

xulrunner-1.9.2 never installs.
the postinst script never finishes.
i have once again edited the script to make sure everything gets done, but I have NO IDEA what sort of side effects could come up.

Here it is again, with all the "if" statements commented out to make sure the script runs all the way through.

#!/bin/sh
set -e

XUL_VERSION=1.9.2
GRE_VERSION=`/usr/bin/xulrunner-$XUL_VERSION --gre-version`

#if [ "$1" = "configure" ] || [ "$1" = "abort-upgrade" ]; then
        /usr/sbin/update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/xulrunner \
                xulrunner /usr/bin/xulrunner-$XUL_VERSION 50
# if test -e /usr/lib/xulrunner-$GRE_VERSION/.autoreg; then
  touch /usr/lib/xulrunner-$GRE_VERSION/.autoreg
# fi

 # Remove possible left-over
# if [ -f /etc/ld.so.conf.d/xulrunner-$XUL_VERSION ] ; then
  rm -f /etc/ld.so.conf.d/xulrunner-$XUL_VERSION
# fi

 ldconfig
#fi

[quequotion (quequotion)]

UPDATE

Apparently, just commenting out the if statements for this does not solve the problem anymore.

In order to get the install to progress I have commented out everything except "ldconfig"

Could someone tell me why I have to do that?

[quequotion (quequotion)]

david@ProliantMK2:~$ /usr/sbin/update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/xulrunner xulrunner /usr/bin/xulrunner-$XUL_VERSION 50
update-alternatives: error: alternative path /usr/bin/xulrunner- doesn't exist.

Could this have anything to do with it?