[Debconf-devel] Bug#425397: tasksel/pkgsel causing Etch netboot install to hang indefinitely

[Adrian Bridgett]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 20:38:12 +0100 (+0100), Adrian Bridgett wrote:
> However, I still get some hangs (one I've seen before). In this case,
> dpkg-preconfigure is sat in a waitpid(pidof /tmp/postfix.config...)
> whilst postfix.config is sat reading STDIN (which is FD#8 from the
> dpkg-preconfigure.  There is a dpkg-preconfigure zombie process
> between these two.

Well after several days of pouring over "ls -l /proc/$$/fd" output etc
(and with very little actually understanding of how the
DEBIAN_FRONTEND, DEBIAN_HAS_FRONTEND, DEBCONF_REDIR is supposed to
be being used!), I have some workarounds which let me use puppet with
a debian preseed to make a fully automated install.

I've attached the three patches I'm using (on top of your debconf
patch) which allow this to work.  Mostly they involve checking if file
descriptor #3 is actually open - if it's not then unset DEBCONF_REDIR
(and possibly DEBIAN_HAS_FRONTEND - I only just saw that there is also
DEBIAN_FRONTEND :-( ).    BTW ClientConfModule.pm is the
"Client/ConfModule.pm" file.

It looks like apt-get is closing the FDs in ExecFork which does look
at an APT::Keep-Fds option but I've not looked any further.

Thanks,

Adrian
-- 
Email: adrian at smop.co.uk  -*-  GPG key available on public key servers
Debian GNU/Linux - the maintainable distribution   -*-  www.debian.org
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