Re: Bug#732937: dpkg: fails somewhat regularly on kfreebsd-amd64

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Control: reassign -1 apt
Control: found -1 0.9.13~exp1

On Mon, 2013-12-23 at 07:00:00 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:
> On Sun, 2013-12-22 at 21:53:19 +0100, Axel Beckert wrote:
> > Michael Gilbert wrote:
> > > dpkg seems to often fail on kfreebsd-amd64 on unstable (I had not
> > > experienced this with wheezy).
> > 
> > I can confirm that for kfreebsd-i386.
> 
> Ok, this is something new, I had not seen it before, but I can see
> it being broken only when using apt. The same command using dpkg
> directly works fine.
> 
> I can reproduce it with simply running:
> 
>   $ apt-get install --reinstall git
> 
> > > The error message is
> > > 
> > > E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
> > 
> > Yeah, and noting else. It's not clear, why there was an error.
> 
> The problem is that something messes with dpkg's standard output and
> error, and it fails when doing the fflush() and ferror() check on it
> in m_output() I think. But this seems to be coming from something
> lower than dpkg or apt, perhaps a change in glibc or the kernel. As
> I've tried with downgraded versions matching the ones in stable, and
> it still fails. I've not tested further.

Ok, my testing was flawed, I missed downgrading libapt*.deb, so my
initial suspicion was right, and with those now it stops failing with
«src:apt=0.9.12.1». I'd recommend anyone with up-to-date apt versions
on kfreebsd-* to downgrade and put these packages on hold.

> The last thing reported from dpkg to apt through the status-fd channel
> is:
> 
>   status: git : error : error writing to '<standard output>': No such file or directory
> 
> and then dpkg exits “normally” after proceeding with the error
> unwinding cleanup.
> 
> > > This is easily recoverable by running the command a second time, which
> > > usually succeeds.
> > 
> > Yeah, but it often needs multiple tries though. I usually run
> > "aptitude install -y || aptitude install -y || aptitude install -y"
> > or such after I saw such a failure.
> 
> Ouch.

Thanks,
Guillem