[Bug 349469] Re: debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable

[Thomas Hood]

There is no shortage of duplicates of this report.  I am inclined to
guess that in many cases faulty package scripts are leaving processes
around which fail to release the config.dat lock under some
circumstances.

In order to test this hypothesis I'd like to go back in time and in each
of the 400-odd cases find the rogue process and then figure out why it's
running on the user's system. Obviously that's impossible.  But perhaps
we will have chances to do this in the future.

I certainly don't think that the *majority* of cases has arisen from a
package management command being run from a terminal while another
package management process runs.  I was just asking in #30 whether or
not there are higher-level locks that should be taken by such commands,
resulting in earlier and more useful error messages.  It seems not.  In
that case I'd say that for now the error message ("debconf: DbDriver
"config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process:
Resource temporarily unavailable") should be extended to give some
advice about how to fix the problem... and possibly also to ask for
information to be contributed here.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/349469

Title:
  debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by
  another process: Resource temporarily unavailable

Status in “debconf” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  If you have encountered this bug, please run:

    sudo fuser /var/cache/debconf/config.dat

  for each of the shown process IDs, please run:

    pstree -s $pid

  and report the output to this bug.

  Binary package hint: cups

  Crash detection report attached.

  ProblemType: Package
  Architecture: i386
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
  ErrorMessage: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
  Package: cups 1.3.9-2ubuntu8
  SourcePackage: cups
  Title: package cups 1.3.9-2ubuntu8 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
  Uname: Linux 2.6.27-11-generic i686

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