Re: Broken xserver-xorg in Sid

[cass iano <cleal@via-rs.net>]

Michael Pobega wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 08:38:21PM -0300, cass iano wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I am running Debian Sid for a while now, and have never had any 
> > troubles. Turns out that I have just upgraded the whole of it, and 
> > xserver-xorg 7.1.0-18 fails to set up.
> >
> > I had 7.1.0-17 working flawlessly until now, but I'm afraid that I am 
> > going to be X-less for a while now, since I cannot install -17 or -16 
> > for that matter.
> >
> > What happens is that aptitude, apt-get or dpkg just hang on 'Setting up 
> > xserver-xorg (7.1.0-18) ...' and will just go on if I hit Control-C, 
> > which obviously just aborts the set up and leaves a broken package.
> >
> > How can I try to trace the error, file a bug report (if it's the case), etc?
> >
> > I would really appreciate any help on this matter, beginning with how to 
> > find out what has hung the setup and how to fix it.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Cassiano Leal
>
> Have you tried dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg?
>
> If that fails remove it from /var/cache/apt/archives
> (xserver-xorg-7.1.0-18.deb would be my guess) and try installing it with
> APT.

Yeah, I have even tried to manually download it from packages.debian.org 
and installing it with dpkg -i, but still to no avail.

I have found out through htop's tree listing (what a wonderful tool htop 
is!) that the process that was hanging was a 'discover 
--disableblahblahblah' command inside xserver-xorg.postinst (on 
/var/lib/dpkg/info, IIRC). So, I went into the .postinst and tried to 
find the line that was executing the command.

Turns out that it was only trying (as far as I could understand) to 
check whether discover was version 1.x, by throwing the output of the 
command into a variable. So, what I did was to substitute the line

VARIABLE=$(discover --disableblahblahblah | greps and awks and stuff)

for

VARIABLE='Discover 1.1'

and tried to reinstall the package. Voilà! That was it.

It still bugs me, though, to think that at xserver-xorg's next upgrade 
it might break again.

One note: before I did this, I tried to run discover with no parameters, 
and it also hung. So, I downgraded discover to the previous version and 
tried to run it again, and it worked. xserver-xorg's setup did not, 
though, and I still had to do the script editing workaround.

Well, if anybody goes into this trouble, maybe this info will help.

Thanks for the help, though!

Cassiano