Cannot resolve dpkg interrupt

[elementaryBot]

Cannot resolve dpkg interrupt

[davidmhewitt]

I never really did any in depth testing on this at the time. I think it's worth keeping open for consideration in the future for when I get around to having another sprint at fixing a bunch of appcenter issues.

[danirabbit]

Gonna punt from Juno beta2 because this issue occurs in Loki and isn't new to Juno

[cassidyjames]

From @davidmhewitt at elementary/appcenter#813 (comment):

After doing some more testing and looking at the code of PackageKit, I'm of the strong belief that it may already be able to resolve this issue and other issues like it with the repair_system methods.

I guess the only thing worth thinking about is the UX behind it. I think the sensible thing to do would be to assume that the system is broken in some way if an upgrade/removal/installation fails, but then do we automatically attempt a repair_system in that case or do we let the user choose?

There's some risk behind doing it automatically, because depending on how broken the packaging system is, there's always the risk of breaking it more by letting some algorithm try to automatically add/remove packages to try and bring it back into a sensible state. But at the same time it's quite a technical question that may confuse people. I guess the only benefit we're offering by not doing it automatically and letting the user choose is that the more technical users that understand apt/dpkg at the command line possibly have a somewhat better chance at resolving it manually and they can cancel the auto repair.

[cassidyjames]

Personally, I think we should be safe to attempt to fix things automatically if things are broken when we go to update or install something.

If the user's system is in a broken state, then I think it's the least we can do. Users who are using apt/dpkg are probably not updating/installing via AppCenter anyway, so I think they'd see the breakage themselves when in the Terminal and be able to fix it there.

I'm not gonna lie, this is also an easy out from designing an error dialog that explains the situation well to all users and gives them the choice. Because that sounds really hard. 😛

[cassidyjames]

We also do have the developer flag. Maybe if that's set, then we don't attempt a repair and just throw a dialog explaining the error? I'm not sure what else that flag is intended to affect…

[cassidyjames]

@davidmhewitt do we know if this is still a practical issue in AppCenter?

[danirabbit]

Moving to settings-daemon since AppCenter is planned to no longer support packagekit updates