Widespread damage? [Was: Re: nano breaks my dpkg]
On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 10:02:26AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> This is already vying for the title of the bug with most duplicate
> reports, so please no. :)
So I see. Yet this has so many different manifestations, apparently.
Might I please request of the List a little feedback on this minor
trauma I am currently undergoing?
Two days ago I did a major upgrade on my laptop running Woody w/ kernel
2.4.18, most packages I was upgrading were going *from* original
"Woody-3.0" not "3.0r1" (and what the heck is "3.0r1a anyway?? Is that
real?). Following this change some difficulties immediately appeared. At
present my system is not trashed -- in fact many kde updates seem to be
making things work out a bit nicer on the desktop -- but I am missing
some beloved tools and am disquieted, and at a loss.
I shall now try (I am not good at this...) to reconstruct:
I first saw the problem when packages being installed for the first time
wanted to be (pre-)configured (by dpkg running under apt, natch). My
terminal suddenly went crazy with some message about "io error blah
blah..." and scrolled endlessly until I issued a kill from another pty.
Tracking it down based on the ps I did each time this happened (oh, yes,
it was "repeatable") it looked to have connections to /usr/bin/editor
(IIRC) which was a symlink to something in /etc/opt/ (gosh, I never even
looked in there before). Whatever it was, it was broken. I removed the
symlink after doing some research on what dpkg might have been asking
for at that point, and made a replacement symlink to my vim editor. Why,
whaddayaknow, that little hack worked.
What is bizarre is that "aptconf" ("apt-conf"?) had always given me the
nice curses-based dialog I original requested for doing package
configurations. Now suddenly apt/dpkg weren't doing that but falling
back (MUCH lower) onto the "editor" -style configuration (one step above
"non-interactive"). I don't know why -- *I* didn't do it! ;-) -- and I
don't know how to fix it.
ALSO another symptom is that aptitude is broken. It starts and shows
"checking cache" (advanced agedness = memory shot, sorry that this is
perhaps only an approximation of the exact wording...) but then hangs
forever there. I *love* aptitude (although I deeply respect dselect now)
and I miss it.
`dpkg -C' is silent, shows no broken-ness; I have run apt-get a couple
more times since this all happened and it works without a hitch --
except for perhaps the pre-configuring part (I think no package I've
needed to install has required pre-configuration).
Is this ALL a symptom of the libstdc++5 bug? Possibly?
Thanks.
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