[Koha-devel] dselect non-funcitonal on Ubuntu

[MJ Ray]

Tomas Cohen Arazi <tomascohen at gmail.com>
> This simple test probes dselect is currently broken on Ubuntu amd64
> 12.04/10.04 (as root):

I don't think it is generally broken.  "dselect install" runs without
problems on a 10.04 server near me (through sudo).

> $ echo "apache2 install" | dpkg --set-selections
> $ dselect install
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> The following NEW packages will be installed:
>   gcc-4.6-base:i386 libasn1-8-heimdal:i386 libc6:i386 libcap2:i386
> libcomerr2:i386 libdb5.1:i386 libexpat1:i386 libgcc1:i386
> libgcrypt11:i386
>   libgnutls26:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libgssapi3-heimdal:i386
> libhcrypto4-heimdal:i386 libheimbase1-heimdal:i386
> libheimntlm0-heimdal:i386
>   libhx509-5-heimdal:i386 libkrb5-26-heimdal:i386 libldap-2.4-2:i386
> libp11-kit0:i386 libpcre3:i386 libroken18-heimdal:i386 libsasl2-2:i386
>   libsasl2-modules:i386 libsqlite3-0:i386 libssl1.0.0:i386
> libtasn1-3:i386 libuuid1:i386 libwind0-heimdal:i386 zlib1g:i386
> 0 upgraded, 29 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
> Need to get 8,500 kB of archives.
> After this operation, 22.2 MB of additional disk space will be used.
> Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

That just looks like some other dselect selections are set.  They
might be security updates and other available upgrades, because I
think dselect just does those without asking.  Try running dselect and
picking "Select" from its menu to check what is set and, if needed,
clearing any that aren't wanted.  Maybe there is no suitable apache2
to install. I suspect the key thing is the ":i386" on there.  I never
see anything like that when running dselect.  Maybe this is
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/879324

> So I propose the removal of dselect usage from the docs and use of
> simple apt-get commands (perhaps providing a convenient script).

Ouch! That seems like an overreaction to strange output on some
system.

I would hope that QA rejects most scripts designed to be run as root.
It is very wrong to encourage root to do "sh script.sh" or
"./script.sh" during installation, because it could do absolutely
anything to the system (think man-in-the-middle attack, or some
unforseen situation which leads to a script doing rm -rf /).  It's far
safer to ask people to load in package lists to an apt frontend.

We could use "apt-get dselect-upgrade" as dselect is just an apt
frontend, but it's one we can manipulate in bulk through dpkg.

If dselect isn't working for some people, can we bulk-update apt
another way, then just let it run?

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/