[Bug 979661] Re: oneiric to precise: debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Gnome and falls back to Dialog

[Colin Watson]

debconf will automatically fall back from the Gnome frontend to Dialog,
then Readline, then Teletype, then Noninteractive, depending on which
one appears to be usable first.  The problem is that update-manager
creates a VTE terminal to run things in for logging purposes, which does
a good enough job of being a terminal that debconf has no realistic way
to tell that it isn't supposed to use it due to it not actually being
visible.  In fact, the solution isn't obvious because the terminal
*might* be visible (expanded terminal widget or whatever).

What's a little curious is that update-manager isn't already overriding
DEBIAN_FRONTEND at least to dialog, seeing as it contains this code:

        # if no libgtk2-perl is installed show the terminal
        frontend= os.environ.get("DEBIAN_FRONTEND") or "gnome"
        if frontend == "gnome" and self._cache:
          if (not "libgtk2-perl" in self._cache or
              not self._cache["libgtk2-perl"].is_installed):
            frontend = "dialog"
            self.expander.set_expanded(True)
        self.env = ["VTE_PTY_KEEP_FD=%s"% self.writefd,
                    "APT_LISTCHANGES_FRONTEND=none"]
        if not os.environ.has_key("DEBIAN_FRONTEND"):
          self.env.append("DEBIAN_FRONTEND=%s" % frontend)

So this should already cause upgrades without libgtk2-perl installed to
run with the Dialog frontend and with the terminal expanded so that you
can see it.  (Perhaps not ideal UI, but it would at least work.)

My first thought was that perhaps libgtk2-perl had been removed during
the upgrade, but no, that isn't so, and perl-base hasn't even been
upgraded yet so this isn't a perl upgrade problem.  So I'm a little
puzzled at this point.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/979661

Title:
  oneiric to precise: debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Gnome and
  falls back to Dialog

Status in “update-manager” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I was doing an upgrade from Oneiric to Precise and the machine hung in
  the process. There was a dialog somewhere in the background that I
  didn't see:

  debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Gnome
  debconf: (Unable to load Gtk -- is libgtk2-perl installed?)
  debconf: falling back to frontend: Dialog

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