[Bug 1241376] Re: procps (1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6.1) upgrade error

[Peter Cordes]

(copied from my comment in bug 1247921, since this is the exact bug I
had, and more people are looking at this)

I ran into this today, and eventually (thanks to strace!) figured out
that I had a config file that didn't end with a newline. 30-SpiderOak,
like several other people, actually.  So what was getting fed to sysctl
was actually

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 65536fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 65536

(yes, two files in a row were setting the same value, but the first one
didn't end with a newline).

 So sysctl opened /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches, and wrote
"65536fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 65536" to it. Then printed an error,
and exited with a non-zero status, making the upstart job fail.

 So, biggest problem here is that the upstart job shouldn't fail if you
have one bad line in one config file. warning somehow would be
excellent, but I think most people would rather not have their whole
package upgrade chain blocked while they sort this out.

 Admittedly, I probably wouldn't have noticed it at all if it hadn't
blocked dpkg, and I was only ok because other lines were also setting
the same key. If this had been something important for security, I might
not be arguing that the upstart job should be cat | sysctl; true

 Printing the key value would probably be a good idea, too, that would
have saved me a bunch of debugging after I found where upstart stores
its scripts and logs. (I feel old for being used to good old init.d
scripts that I could run manually to see their output... Hey upstart,
get off of my lawn. Although honestly the format of the files in
/etc/init/ is very easy to understand, I found the script portion
without any trouble so I could still just run what the script was trying
to do.)

 I tried a bunch of different inputs to sysctl, including noticing that
I got no errors if I fed it the config files one at a time with for i in
/etc/sysctl.d/* /etc/sysctl.conf; do echo $i;sudo sysctl -e -p
"$i";done. As I said, I didn't figure out that I had a file not ending
in newline until I ran cat ... | sudo sysctl -e -p - 2>&1 | less

 I feel like this could have been a lot easier to debug with better
error messages, even leaving aside that I had to learn my way around
upstart at the beginning of this. Oh, and to figure out that the procps
postinst script was trying to start an upstart job called procps. I
wasn't 100% sure from the error messages. (although now that I look at
the invoke-rc.d line, it does say it was the procps init script.)

 So, bottom line, procps init script should probably not fail when the
only errors are invalid values for keys. It already ignores unknown
keys, with the -e option. Maybe sysctl needs an option to ignore errors
of the other kind? Although if a key exists, errors assigning to it are
much more likely to be a problem, so you do want to at least warn, but
don't want to ignore them or trainwreck dpkg / apt.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to procps in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1241376

Title:
  procps (1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6.1) upgrade error

Status in “procps” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  When trying to upgrade procps on ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS I receive some
  errors, the package stays in broken state and cannot be upgraded:

  procps (1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6.1) wird eingerichtet ...
  start: Job failed to start
  invoke-rc.d: initscript procps, action "start" failed.
  dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von procps (--configure):
   Unterprozess installiertes post-installation-Skript gab den Fehlerwert 1 zurück
  Es wurde kein Apport-Bericht verfasst, da das Limit MaxReports bereits erreicht ist
                                                                                     Fehler traten auf beim Bearbeiten von:
   procps
  E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
  Ein Paket konnte nicht installiert werden. Versuch, dies zu lösen:
  procps (1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6.1) wird eingerichtet ...
  start: Job failed to start
  invoke-rc.d: initscript procps, action "start" failed.
  dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von procps (--configure):
   Unterprozess installiertes post-installation-Skript gab den Fehlerwert 1 zurück
  Fehler traten auf beim Bearbeiten von:
   procps

  The versions of procps:
    Installiert: 1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6.1
    Kandidat:    1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6.2
    Versionstabelle:
       1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6.2 0
          500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main amd64 Packages
   *** 1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6.1 0
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
       1:3.2.8-11ubuntu6 0
          500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main amd64 Packages

  I also ran "cat /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf /etc/sysctl.conf | sudo sysctl -p
  -" without an error.

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/procps/+bug/1241376/+subscriptions