Bug#771971: dpkg hangs installing "init" during upgrade from wheezy to jessie

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Sun, 2015-01-25 at 12:30:51 +0100, Niels Thykier wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Dec 2014 00:56:48 +0000 Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> > This is reproducible on demand \o/
> > 
> > I realised that the VM image had a few unneeded packages, so I did
> > 
> > # apt-get remove --purge x11-common libx11-6 libx11-data
> > 
> > then
> > 
> > # apt-get update
> > # apt-get dist-upgrade
> > 
> > and got the same result as my first run.
> > 
> > On a *second* run I did not do that purge up-front and the upgrade did
> > *not* block in the same way.

> Just to confirm, is this correctly understood?
> 
>  * If you purge "x11-common libx11-6 libx11-data" before upgrading, the
>    upgrade hangs.
>  * If you keep "x11-common libx11-6 libx11-data" as-is, the upgrade
>    succeeds.
> 
> What state are the above packages before the upgrade?
> 
> Can you try to reproduce this again and attach strace or/and gdb to the
> dpkg process when it hangs to figure out what it does/where it is stuck.
>   Based on Dominik's remark (100% cpu usage) in comment #15, I suspect
> it is in an infinite loop.  Though I would appreciate it, if we can
> confirm or disprove that.

Adding -D77777 to the dpkg call through apt's DPkg::options would be
helpful. It would also be helpful to know which process hangs, and if
it's dpkg itself an easy recipe to reproduce this?

Thanks,
Guillem