Re: [LONG] Re: "Exec format error" bugs

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 09:15:52 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Package: dpkg
> Version: 1.15.5.6
> Severity: important

> [ For debian-dpkg, see
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dpkg/+bug/512096 for a
> description of the problem, basically a configuration script is empty
> /broken due to data loss and the recovery needs manual intervention ]

Ugh, that page is scary, there's a ton of duplicate bugs.

> I would suggest that dpkg detects the error and brings back the
> package state to half-installed forcing the package manager to
> unpack it again.
> 
> It seems to me that the error code ENOEXEC is sufficiently specific (and it
> could be associated to a check of the file length if needed) for this to
> be reasonable.

I'd rather fix the problem that's causing those files to be 0 length.
That should generally never happen, I'm assuming they might just need an
fsync on the directory, which we are not doing at all in general, there
might be some fsyncs on files missing too. What's the difference in
Ubuntu that causes all these reporters to suffer such error, I had never
seen that one before, and it's not been reported in our BTS either. Are
all those reporters using ext4 or ubifs? Anything else different from
Debian you might be aware of?

thanks,
guillem