Re: packages broken

[Zach <netrek@gmail.com>]

Florian wrote:

>The command itself seems to use only about 2.6 seconds of CPU time
>(user+sys) and spends the rest of the 1m19s waiting for something, most
>probably data transfer from the hard drive. You see the CPU at 90-100%
>during the whole time, so maybe DMA is not working. You can use "hdparm
>/dev/hda" to check this. (This command is part of package "hdparm" and
>has to be run as root; replace "/dev/hda" as is appropriate for your
>system.)

Ah ok.

>I saw that you filed a bug report (#460532). There seem to be two
>related older reports (#406709, #396439). In one case the submitter
>states in a follow-up that a corrupted .desktop file was to blame, but
>the general problem still seems unresolved to me. (Even if you also have
>a corrupt data file, the tool should deal more gracefully with such a
>situation.)

I checked in my normal user account's $HOME and in root's $HOME and
there is no ~/.desktop file. Could that be the problem? I run Gnome.

>I have two more suggestions for you to improve the chances of this
>bug getting fixed:
>
>1) Just to be sure, check if there are any other stray libraries in
>   /usr/local/lib. Run "ldconfig -pNX | grep /local/" as a normal user.
>   If this comes up empty then your system is OK in that respect.

It found some:

zu22@netrek:~$ /sbin/ldconfig -pNX | grep /local/
	libXm.so.2 (libc6) => /usr/local/lib/libXm.so.2
	libXm.so (libc6) => /usr/local/lib/libXm.so
	libUil.so.2 (libc6) => /usr/local/lib/libUil.so.2
	libUil.so (libc6) => /usr/local/lib/libUil.so
	libMrm.so.2 (libc6) => /usr/local/lib/libMrm.so.2
	libMrm.so (libc6) => /usr/local/lib/libMrm.so
	libDtPrint.so.1 (libc6) => /usr/local/lib/libDtPrint.so.1
	libDtPrint.so (libc6) => /usr/local/lib/libDtPrint.so

What should I do about this? I guess I am at the mercy of the package
maintainer fixing whatever is wrong and waiting for the new packages
to be released but with this error I'm wondering if it will be able to
install the new version of desktop-file-utils if it needs the broken
update-desktop-database in order to install it!

>2) Install the packages libglib2.0-0-dbg, libc6-dbg, and libpcre3-dbg.
>   Then use gdb again to get a better debugging report (with symbols)
>   and send this output as a follow-up to your bug.

Good idea.

>The following trick should allow you to get your package manager going
>again: As root, do
>
>mv /usr/bin/update-desktop-database /usr/bin/update-desktop-database-HIDDEN
>ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/update-desktop-database
>
>This moves update-desktop-database out of the way and replaces it with a
>symlink to /bin/true, a command that is always successful. The
>problematic installation scripts should complete now and the package
>manager should work again. (Once the bug is fixed you should remove the
>symlink and put the original file back in its place, of course. Then run
>update-desktop-database once as root.)

Cool, good tip.

Regards,
Zach