Re: [Synaptic-devel] gsynaptic & synaptic sudden shutdown

[Michael Vogt]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your feedback. 

On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 03:27:08PM -0500, Richard wrote:
> Am using SuSE 8.0, apt 0.5.4, and gsynaptic 0.21-3cl.  The interface is very 
> nice but has a couple of un-nice things happening.

There is a new version 0.23 (not to confuse with 0.23pre1) available at 
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/synaptic 

If you have time you may want to give it a try, there are some new featues.

> 1. At the end of an upgrade attempt sometimes synaptic will shutdown without 
> warning.  It usually happens when the upgrade is unsuccessful, but has 
> happened after a successful upgrade.   I can not discern any pattern to the 
> shutdowns. The shutdown occurrs with both synaptic and gsynaptic.

Do you see any output to stdout/stderr before it dies? I never saw
such a behaviour on my machine (debian/sid). I wonder if it happens
with 0.23 as well. Maybe it has something to do with the rpm
installprogress? A unhandled signal maybe? I will try to reproduce it
and see what I can do. Gustavo, any idea?

> 2.  When an upgrade is unsuccessful the only error message is a rather 
> cryptic:
> Sub process /bin/rpm returned an error code (244)
> the error code has been a 2, 14, and 16.
> If I run the command line: apt-get upgrade, after the failure I can see the 
> reason for the failures.  That data should be displayed by synaptic so you 
> can figure out what to do. Error codes are nice but only if you can translate 
> them into meaningful words.  

I hope to fix this before the next release. But expect at least two
week, because I'm currently very busy and 0.24 has some very
experimental stuff in it currently (half ready "hold" feature for
example).

> a) Rename the Update button to something like  Get Update List or Load Update 
> List.   What it actually does is retrieve the available update list, right? 
> To the unwashed Update means just that and is confusing especially with 
> Upgrade next to it.

Good point, I changed this to "Update List".

> b) Rename Upgrade button to something like, Select All to Upgrade, or Select 
> All for Upgrading since it is only selecting those installed apps to be 
> upgraded.

Changed too. Thanks.

> Having said all that, I want you to know that I really appreciate this 
> version 
> of synaptic.  It has made the use of apt much nicer.  

Thanks. Feel free to send more feedback like this. It's very welcome :)

bye,
 Michael
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