OT: dpkg hangs unpacking

[Natxo Asenjo]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Brian Kroth <bpkroth at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've seen that a number of times while trying to install things via
> cfengine.  Usually you'll see something like whiptail or dialog in the
> process table.  There's a number of "magic" flags and environment variables
> you can try and set in order to tell aptitude to *really* be silent, but
> they don't always seem to work.  For instance, we have something like this
> in our cfengine rules:
>
> missing_pkg_foo::
>        "/usr/bin/yes | DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
> DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical DEBCONF_NONINTERACTIVE_SEEN=true /usr/bin/apt-get
> -y --force-yes install foo"

I'll try that this one as our dpkg install comand in cfengine, it
looks like debconf really really musth do nothing after that.

[knip]

> You can also use the fai debconf rules to "answer" certain questions ahead
> of time.  We used to do that for sun-java for example.

yes, we preseed stuff as well in fai, and that works nicely for fai.
But somehow for cfengine sometimes it does not work as it should.

<mild rant>

Debconf gets sometimes in my way, I guess I will have to learn to be
nicer to it instead of cursing it :). I mean, I understand why for one
user workstations it can be nice, but for hundreds/thousands of hosts
it can sometimes be, ok, I'll say it: irritating. I then even for a
short time wish I was running another flavor of linux with an rpm
backend. Of course, that feeling goes away when I need to install
software not in the standard rhel/centos repos and the dependency hell
starts.

</mild rant>

[knip]
> I've also run across pkgsync as a potential way to solve this in the past
> but haven't had a chance to test it.  If anyone has any comments on it I'd
> be interested to hear them.

pkgsync looks interesting. Thanks for sharing. I have read its doc and
there are even examples for cfengine in it. NIce. You can have a list
of stuff you want and do not want, so if it gets installed it gets
removed. Definitely a must try.

-- 
natxo