[Bug 856533] Re: Poor feedback, and no ability to escape, when an installation hangs

[Sebastian Heinlein]

In the future apt-brtfs could be the way to go - taking snaphsots of the
system and reverting the state on broken operations. But also a problem
for systems with /home and /root on the same parition.

We cannot safely kill the maintainer script. We can only try to recover
as goog as possible. Running FixIncompleteInstall and FixBrokenDepends
(dpkg --configure -a and apt-get install -f)

On older systems a large installation can take longer than 30 minutes.
E.g. think of people running on USB drives.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/856533

Title:
  Poor feedback, and no ability to escape, when an installation hangs

Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “aptdaemon” package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in “software-center” package in Ubuntu:
  New

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/removal scripts. We should also have a failsafe that
  stops the operation -- or at least gives you the choice to stop the
  operation -- once the system can tell that it's not getting anywhere.

  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.

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