Monday 18 June 2018

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

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?

Thanks