OT: dpkg hangs unpacking

[Natxo Asenjo]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Toomas Tamm <tt-fai at kky.ttu.ee> wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-02-10 at 09:15 +0100, Natxo Asenjo wrote:
>
>> Have any of you guys come accross such problems? How did you tackle
>> them if you did?
>
> I have debugged several "mystery" bugs in my life, most of them
> successfully. Usually it takes a lot of very primitive and tedious work.
> I have not observed the situation you describe, so I cannot help with
> this particular one, only give general advice.
>
> For cases where a debugger can not be attached, adding printouts to the
> software is usually the way to go.
>
> I would start by downloading the source of package in question (dpkg,
> although you may find that eventually the bug is in a different
> package), and making sure you can re-compile the package and reproduce
> the bug with the copy you compiled yourself.
>
> Once this is achieved, start adding printouts to the source and, after
> several rounds, find the place where it hangs. It is very likely that
> this leads to another package, and then another, etc. In may cases, I
> have eventually come to the conclusion that there was no bug at all,
> just some kind of (mis)configuration problem.

Thanks for your advice.

Misconfiguration is always possible. However, knowing this same config
has worked flawlessly during the whole oldstable release makes that
issue nearly not existing. I will of course have to prove that :-)

So, this is going to be a long project. For the time being installing
the software while bootstrapping the systems is working now (at least
in i686, 2 installations have finished successfully, which is much
more than what I had so far - now amd64).

Thanks again!

--
Natxo