Poor feedback, and no ability to escape, when an installation hangs
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| apt (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Medium
|
Unassigned | ||
| aptdaemon (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Medium
|
Unassigned | ||
| software-center (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
There are many bug reports about situations where an installation goes part-way through, and then gets stuck. For example, bug 815102, bug 796672, bug 795931, bug 795000, bug 779343, bug 775687, bug 753530, bug 730397, bug 725185, bug 723617, and bug 722814.
When an installation gets stuck like this, Ubuntu Software Center gives no sign that it is stuck, it just says "Applying changes" forever. And it's not obvious how to unstick it, short of restarting the computer.
As long as Ubuntu allows maintainer scripts, and as long as maintainer scripts can do anything they like, it will be possible for an installation to get wedged. And as long as we allow installation of third-party packages, some of those problems will not be fixable by Ubuntu developers.
Therefore, we can't rely just on fixing bugs in individual installation/
Possible definitions of "it's not getting anywhere":
(a) the overall installation, after the download finished, has taken more than 30 minutes
(b) the installation hasn't written to any files in the past 5 minutes
(c) an strace of the installation script shows that it's in a loop
(d) something else
(e) some combination of these.
If you do choose to stop an installation, apt should then do its level best to undo whatever the installation had done so far.
| Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor) wrote | #1 |
| Changed in apt (Ubuntu): | |
| status: | New → Confirmed |
| importance: | Undecided → Medium |
| Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor) wrote | #2 |
| Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor) wrote | #3 |
| Changed in aptdaemon (Ubuntu): | |
| status: | New → Confirmed |
| importance: | Undecided → Medium |
| Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote | #4 |
| Changed in software-center (Ubuntu): | |
| status: | New → Confirmed |
| David Girault (dfgweb) wrote | #5 |
We could add a terminal widget :) Just kidding.