package language-pack-gnome-en-base 1:8.04+20080527 failed to install/upgrade: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

Thanks for your report.
Did you kill the processes? Can you reproduce the issue by rerunning the localedef process?

Yes, during the upgrade procedure I had to kill the localdef processes a few (3 or 4) times.

The upgrade tool displayed dialog boxes telling me that some packages could not be installed due to (broken?) dependencies. After clicking through all the dialogs I rebooted the machine. The computer hung at the 'Ubuntu' screen; terminals were unresponsive/unavailable at this time. I then forced the power off and rebooted, this time successfully. After getting back to a terminal window, I performed another:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

apt said there were no new packages to install but some that needed configuring (my memory is a little fuzzy here). Then localdef did its thing rebuilding 4 or 5 or so locales. Apt completed successfully.

Now the installation appears to be working fine.

Thanks,

Eric.

I did not try rerunning localdef because it appeared to run successfully when I ran apt-get dist-upgrade that last time.

Thanks for the investigation. The dependency problems are related to the configuring process having been killed, so that's a "user error" (though you had no other choice, of course). I'm closing this bug because we can't seem to get any more information about why localedef was hanging.

Thanks again
Kjell

Thanks Kjell for your attention to this issue. I understand why you are going to close it.

Let me just reiterate that, when the localdef process was spinning away, it appeared that it was waiting on a zombied gzip process. I'm making that assumption based on my observing that every time localdef would 'freeze', ps showed a zombied gzip process immediately below the localdef process.

I hope that is helpful.

Best regards,

Eric.

It's going on for me right now. Is there any information that you could use?

Hi Carl,

Finding out the process id of the localedef process and capturing an
strace of the process would be great.

  strace -f -o /tmp/localedef.strace.txt -p <pid>

should be a start.

Thanks,

James