Re: How to troubleshoot aptitude segfaults ?

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 03:12:24PM +0000, David Corking <lists@dcorking.com> was heard to say:
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> >  I was going to suggest installing aptitude-dbg, but...
> >
> >  ...do you mean etch or lenny?
> 
> Yes - I mean etch (4.0).  I upgraded that server to etch a long time
> ago, then put up with a broken aptitude for a long time without
> investigating deeply (can't afford much downtime.)  It seemed to be a
> good idea to try to fix it before attempting an overnight upgrade to
> lenny.

  One of the first steps in the lenny upgrade is to upgrade aptitude
and apt (if you haven't read the release / upgrade notes yet, you might
want to take a look at them before you upgrade).  There might not be
much point in trying to track down the problem with your current version
of aptitude if you're about to replace it.

> > If you really mean etch, then
> > aptitude-dbg is not available.  You'll have to run apt-get source to
> > fetch the aptitude source and then compile it with debugging symbols.
> > (./configure && make should do the trick, once you install the
> > build-deps)
> 
> Thanks!  Once I have a debuggable binary, which trace or dump do you need?

  Run "gdb aptitude" and type "run upgrade" and when it crashes, type
"where" to get a backtrace.

> What would you say to this alternative?
> 1 - upgrade to lenny with (apt-get upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade)
> 2 - run aptitude.  If still not working,
> 3 - apt-get aptitude-dbg  and try to get a trace or core dump for you
> with the debug symbols

  I would suggest just upgrading aptitude on its own (with the command
"apt-get install aptitude") and seeing whether it works.  If it does,
you can use it for the rest of the upgrade.

  Daniel