Making apt-get powercut-proof

[ffm at cluenet.org]

> On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 08:57:36PM +0100, Andrew Sayers wrote:
>> A friend of mine was upgrading to Hardy, and (so far as we can tell)
>> there was a power cut while it was halfway through, which left his
>> system in a not-especially-useful state.  I think the best solution is
>> to have a /etc/init.d/{apt-get|dpkg} script that checks for
>> half-finished installs, and restarts them if necessary.  If so, which
>> (or both) would be better, and is there anyone here that knows enough
>> about the two to suggest a complete set of commands that need to be run?
>>  Also, is this something we should be doing in an Ubuntu-specific way
>> (e.g. from X), or should I take this idea to Debian?
>
> Another use case (which I've run into a few times) is if you are doing
> the upgrade unattended, it pauses for confirmation about a change to a
> config file, and [battery runs out | wife turns off computer | system
> locks up due to a suspend/resume bug].
>

Another different but related case is when a package is broken/frozen and
the user is not able to continue (phpbb2-conf-mysql, I'm looking at you!),
it would be nice to have a "skip" button for packages that seem to be
stuck.

-FFM