Debian bug report logs - #967
dselect lock?

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From cus.cam.ac.uk!iwj10 Sat Jun 10 11:59:22 1995
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From: iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk (Ian Jackson)
To: debian-bugs@pixar.com
Subject: Re: Bug#967: dselect lock?

James A. Robinson writes ("Bug#967: dselect lock?"):
> Dselect dumped core on me once when I ran it (I was on an NFS file
> system), but I have not been able to duplicate it.  It might have had
> to dow ith the fact that the available file I posted to debian-bugs
> about before was corrupted.

Oh.  dselect shouldn't ever dump core even if presented with garbage -
if you can persuade (a recent version of) it to do it again please let
me know.

>  In any case, when I re-ran it and choose
> "[L]ist"it complained about being locked.  I removed the two files
> that locked like lock files in /var/lib/dpkg, and it worked fine.  I
> wondering if there is any way to check and see if dselect or dpkg is
> really running, and use that to see if one can wipe the lock file?
> Something like a pid in /var/run?  I don't know if it already does
> something like this.

This is a known problem - it's due to the transition between Perl dpkg
and C dpkg; dselect is written in C and doesn't have the
stale-lock-breaking code.

You can clear the lock `automatically' by using `dpkg --status dpkg'
or some similar thing.

The C version of dpkg will use a different locking scheme which won't
suffer from stale locks.

Ian.

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From simons-rock.edu!jimr Thu Jun  8 05:20:29 1995
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To: Debian Bugs <debian-bugs@pixar.com>
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Subject: dselect lock?
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 1995 08:20:20 -0400
From: "James A. Robinson" <jimr@simons-rock.edu>


Package: dselect
Version: 0.93.42

Dselect dumped core on me once when I ran it (I was on an NFS file
system), but I have not been able to duplicate it.  It might have had
to dow ith the fact that the available file I posted to debian-bugs
about before was corrupted.  In any case, when I re-ran it and choose
"[L]ist"it complained about being locked.  I removed the two files
that locked like lock files in /var/lib/dpkg, and it worked fine.  I
wondering if there is any way to check and see if dselect or dpkg is
really running, and use that to see if one can wipe the lock file?
Something like a pid in /var/run?  I don't know if it already does
something like this.


Jim