[Bug 876298] Re: [MASTER] We need to better handle external payloads (Flash, msttcorefonts) not being available.

[Steve Langasek]

> We need to warn that the script can not do any dpkg operations and that the
> system may be in a state of flux when its run. This maybe a problem for e.g.
> update-alternatives calls, we need to think a bit more what to do here
> (Script-Run-After-Dpkg-Finished: register.sh maybe?).

I don't see any reason that we shouldn't be able to call update-
alternatives - it's normal to run this both in a maintainer script
context and outside of it, and running it from a triggered postinst or a
cronjob should be no exception.  FWIW, flashplugin-nonfree uses u-a and
it's working reliably here.

>The other bit that is tricky is that we need to communicate failures in some
> way - or at least failures that are permanent. (for permanent e.g. more than
> 3 days). One way could be to create a update-notifier notification and to
> provide a cli tool like fetchme --show-queue or --show-incomplete. Plus a
> clear message in the apt log everytime its triggered what is missing and that
> it queued it for later if it has to.

So far what I've implemented is a notification popping up each time the
script runs and fails to process the data.  There's not yet any tracking
of whether a download failure is "permanent" or a different error
message in that case; nor is there particularly clear error output in
the apt log yet.

An open question is how failing downloads should be handled once we've
decided the error is permanent.  Should we continue to try to download
these and just avoid raising notifications about the failures?  Or
should we stop trying to download them at all?  If we stop trying to
download them, I guess we want a mechanism for users to forcibly retry
these downloads once they've fixed their system.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/876298

Title:
  [MASTER] We need to better handle external payloads (Flash,
  msttcorefonts) not being available.

Status in “flashplugin-nonfree” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “update-manager” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “update-notifier” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  At the 11.10 release archive.canonical.com collapsed under heavy load
  and started returning 503 errors.  This caused the flash package to be
  unable to grab its payload and thus caused the package to fail, which
  in turn caused the installation to fail.

  The current plan is to add metadata to a package where it can add a
  URL to retrieve its data, so ubiquity and apt-get --download-only can
  cache it.  We also need a way to queue up package installation post-
  install, for when we commit to installing flash but cannot do so due
  to network issues, or when the user wishes to have full language
  support post-install.

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