Making apt-get powercut-proof

[Michael Vogt]

Hi,

On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 07:06:35PM +0100, Andrew Sayers wrote:
> That's a pretty handy tool - would you be interested in an option to
> start the remote recovery that's being discussed in a nearby thread?

The design of friendly-recovery makes it easy to drop-in scripts, I
wasn't following this thread, but it would certainly be possible to
drop in something into /usr/share/recovery-mode/options that is then
available in the recovery menu.
 
> Also, how would you feel if I suggested the options/dpkg script to the
> APT development team as the basis for an init script?  I don't expect it
> would add more than a few seconds to boot time (or less if there's a
> lockfile that they can check for the existence of), and it would tackle
> the specific issue I had, where the problem presented as a missing home
> directory, and only turned out to be a package installation issue after
> much investigation.

I would prefer to make the package repair a explicit choice by the
user. It may require manual input (conffile questions, debconf
prompts, maintainer script prompts) so it is safer to handle when we
know that a human is available. update-manager has support to deal
with most brokeness in the packages system nowdays (interrupted dpkg,
broken dependencies, packages in req-reinstall state, ...) and
update-notifier will display a error symbol that will call
update-manager. That should cover most of the desktop use-cases.

The friendly-reocvery package with dpkg repair mode  is now also
available in hardy-proposed and should become available to
hardy-updates soonish. 

Thanks,
 Michael