Re: Upgrades blocked by half-installed package, libpam0g
On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 03:25:44 +0000, John O'Hagan wrote:
> Florian Kulzer wrote:
> >On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 10:35:39 +0000, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> >> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 03:54:23AM +0000, John O'Hagan wrote:
> > >> Hi,
> > >>
> >> > I'm running lenny.
> >> >
> >> > The power failed on my laptop during a recent upgrade about a week
> >> > ago. Don't know if this is why, but attempts to upgrade or install any
> >> > new packages since then fail because aptitude (or rather dpkg) chokes
> >> > on repeated attempts to configure libpam0g:
[...]
> >> > # dpkg --configure libpam0g
> >> > Setting up libpam0g (1.0.1-3) ...
> >> > debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Kde
> >> > debconf: (--- No method to call for :)
> >> > debconf: falling back to frontend: Dialog
[...]
> >> > --- No method to call for :
> > >> QApplication::new('Qt::Applic...', ARRAY(0x993c1c8))
> > > >at /usr/lib/perl5/Qt.pm line 464.
> > >
> > >This is debconf?
>
> >I think so; it looks like this bug:
Clarification: This is a bug of libqt-perl and not of debconf. The
postinst of libpam0g is a bash script, so I guess debconf's attempt to
open the KDE frontend must be what gets libqt-perl involved.
> >http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=481642
> >
> >I would run
> >
> >dpkg-reconfigure --frontend=dialog debconf
> >
> >and set the default user interface to "Dialog", at least until this bug
> >is fixed.
> >
>
> Thanks for the assistance.
>
> As usual, Florian is correct: it was not enough to merely force a different
> debconf frontend, but setting the default to dialog did the trick.
Actually I had expected that forcing the frontend via environmental
variables would be enough; I just thought that changing the default
for the time being would be more convenient.
> I'm still a little mystified as I have been getting those two error messages
> for some time without consequence; is it something about libpam0g, or the
> interruption to the original upgrade that precipitated the issue?
The first part - KDE frontend not available, falling back to Dialog -
should indeed be harmless. The QApplication::new error of Qt.pm is much
more serious; see the comments in the bug report. Have you been getting
this error for a longer time already?
Interrupted upgrades can certainly cause all sorts of problems, for
example due to an incomplete transition to a different perl version. I
cannot offer any more meaningful speculation about your case; as a
matter of fact, I don't understand how libqt-perl can pop up at that
moment and bring down the entire post-installation script.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
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