libc6 breaks when pausing update as offered in gui installer

Bug #930323 reported by Bzzz
50
This bug affects 11 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
eglibc (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

Upon updating to 2.15-0ubuntu2, the installer asks for the following user confirmation:

[...]This script detected the following installed services which must be stopped before the upgrade: kdm
If you want to interrupt the upgrade now and continue later, please answer No to the question below.
Do you want to upgrade glibc now?
< Yes > < No >

If choosing "no", one might think the update has been deferred. It's not, it just breaks the whole dependency tree:

apt-get is not able to recover from that "failure", synaptics isn't either.As one package (amd64) is now listed as upgraded to 2.15 and the other one (i386) is still at 2.13, there seems no way down to 2.13 and no way up to 2.15.

sudo apt-get install -f
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: [...]
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libc6:i386 libnih-dbus-dev libnih-dbus1 libnih1
Suggested packages:
  glibc-doc:i386 locales:i386
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libc6:i386 libnih-dbus-dev libnih-dbus1 libnih1
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 172 not upgraded.
14 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/4,029 kB of archives.
After this operation, 140 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
E: Internal Error, No file name for libc6

The correct way seems to install both packages twice by using sudo dpkg -i libc6_2.15-0ubuntu2_i386.deb / libc6_2.15-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb, so that the internal error is fixed (choose "yes" in the dialogue above!) and the package system ifself is sane again. Any other dependency like libnih and whiptail may now be updated. (However, I downgraded those additional dependants first, trying to downgrade everything before the next attempt)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: libc6 2.15-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-14.23-generic 3.2.3
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-14-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.91-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Feb 10 18:58:30 2012
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110426.3)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: eglibc
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-02-04 (5 days ago)

Revision history for this message
Bzzz (da-bzzz) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in eglibc (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
brommel (r-broermann) wrote :

Exactly the same problem here. Also, prcedure as disscribed helps to fix the problem

Changed in eglibc (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Medium
Revision history for this message
Eduard Gotwig (gotwig) wrote :

I recommend to use sudo dpkg --configure -a to configure all broken packages, so you dont have to install a package trough dpkg, etc.

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