Wednesday 20 June 2018

Re: [jak@debian.org: Frontend locking in APT clients]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 01:58:24PM -0700, Seth Arnold wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 08:33:17PM +0200, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> > automatically sets DPKG_FRONTEND_LOCKED when invoking dpkg
> > if the system lock is acquired (after the fork, directly
> > before the execvp). If you run dpkg yourself, like for calling
> > dpkg --configure -a you will probably have to set the environment
> > variable yourself.
>
> Hi Julian, I think I'm mostly excited about the lock changes you've
> described (to the extent I recall previous discussions with you, this
> has the potential to reduce some seriously confusing situations).
>
> But dpkg --configure -a is already deep into the "unhappy user" territory
> and needing to remember an additional environment variable to make it
> work correctly is going to add an additional level of frustration.
>
> Is there no way to make dpkg --configure -a work correctly without
> manually setting environment variables?

It works just fine. "You" in this case meant "an apt frontend holding
the lock". As long as you don't hold the lock (I mean, you probably
could, even in a shell), it would be wrong.

--
debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev
ubuntu core developer i speak de, en