On Mon 13 Jun 2022 at 12:38:37 (+0100), Brad Rogers wrote:
On Mon, 13 Jun 2022 07:24:07 -0400 Greg Wooledge wrote:
>On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 04:58:44AM +0000, Russell L. Harris wrote:
>> I suppose I should have shut down some of processes before running
>> Synaptic.
>That shouldn't be necessary.
While I would generally concur, I would not advise, for example,
performing the monthly firefox upgrade while the browser is running.
Indeed. It seems more likely that the problems arose because Synaptic
was forcefully terminated. Of course, it may have been necessary due to
a (now) unknowable problem.
It would be helpful (maybe) to know how long Russell waited before
performing the reset after Synaptic hung. Too late now, but it might
simply have been performing complex 'bookkeeping' tasks. For example,
occasionally, I've seen initrd.img being written out more than once
during an update (although not recently). That can take time.
Over the weekend, both ntfs-3g and linux-image-5.10.0 were upgraded,
though I split them because I happened to upgrade ntfs-3g just after
midnight Friday. A weekly upgrade might upgrade both at the same time.
I would also point out that a pair of upgrades like this would be
split if you normally upgrade (in apt-get's parlance), but then
dist-upgrade because you see a new kernel image being held back.
But AFAICT, apt-get does not appear to try to avoid generating initrd
twice in the same step. For example, in April, both apparmor and
linux-image-5.10.0 caused initrd regeneration on this PC in one step.
Not being a synaptic user, I don't know whether it informs users of
what it is doing (other than through the logs), but I would have
thought it ought to.