Bug#133446: dpkg: update-alternatives exits with 1
Package: dpkg
Version: 1.9.19
Severity: normal
Basicly the manpage for update-alternatives states 0 and 2 as possible exit
codes. How ever it's possible that update-alternatives returns 1.
for instance when asking for information about a non existing alternative
update-alternatives --display someone-completely-unrelated
At the moment it seems this is an inconsistency between the man page and
the program. But certain programs seems to rely on update-alternatives not
returning anything else then 0 (post install scripts of various packages)
There is one related bug report being:
#133033: post installation exits with status 1
about the exuberant-ctags package exiting because of the 1 exit code in
combination with set -e.
I quick grep of postinst scripts lists quite some more packages that might
suffer from this problem (vim being one of them).
I think the correct solution is to exit with a 0 exit code at the moment
that the alternative doesn't exist. (a patch for this solution is attached)
-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Kernel Version: Linux oi 2.2.20 #2 Sun Feb 10 14:49:53 CET 2002 i686 unknown
Versions of the packages dpkg depends on:
ii libc6 2.2.5-3 GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone
ii libncurses5 5.2.20020112a- Shared libraries for terminal handling
ii libstdc++2.10- 2.95.4-2 The GNU stdc++ library
------------- Patch
--- update-alternatives.orig Mon Feb 11 15:56:56 2002
+++ update-alternatives Mon Feb 11 15:57:04 2002
@@ -165,7 +165,7 @@
if ($mode eq 'display') {
if (!$dataread) {
&pr("No alternatives for $name.");
- exit 1;
+ exit 0;
} else {
&pr("$name - status is $manual.");
if (defined($linkname= readlink("$altdir/$name"))) {
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