Debian Bug report logs - #766524
dpkg: Please reenable and fix --command-fd

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Michael Vogt <mvo@debian.org>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: dpkg: Please provide a way to install/unpack/configure without using argv[]

Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 15:12:52 -0400

Package: dpkg
Severity: wishlist

Dear Dpkg Maintainer,

apt is currently unpacking/configuring packages by running
dpkg --unpack pkg1.deb pkg2.deb ... pkgN.deb
dpkg --configure pkg1 pkg2 ... pkgN

this can be problematic for big installations when the commandline
gets very long and exceeds _SC_ARG_MAX.

One possible solution might be to have something like "--archivefiles-fd"
or "--arg-file" argument where frontends to apt can feed data into.

If thats a direction that sounds sensible I can start working on a
patch for this.

Cheers,
 Michael

Message #10 received at 766524@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>

To: Michael Vogt <mvo@debian.org>, 766524@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#766524: dpkg: Please provide a way to install/unpack/configure without using argv[]

Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:20:54 +0200

Hi!

On Thu, 2014-10-23 at 15:12:52 -0400, Michael Vogt wrote:
> Package: dpkg
> Severity: wishlist

> apt is currently unpacking/configuring packages by running
> dpkg --unpack pkg1.deb pkg2.deb ... pkgN.deb
> dpkg --configure pkg1 pkg2 ... pkgN
> 
> this can be problematic for big installations when the commandline
> gets very long and exceeds _SC_ARG_MAX.
> 
> One possible solution might be to have something like "--archivefiles-fd"
> or "--arg-file" argument where frontends to apt can feed data into.
> 
> If thats a direction that sounds sensible I can start working on a
> patch for this.

There's already the --command-fd command, but it's disabled for now
because it still suffers from some issues. This is in dpkg's TODO
list, and I could just enable it back the first thing in 1.18.0,
targetting experimental, so that it can be tested. I think I remember
at least some of the problems with it, related to at least massive
memory usage due to the non-freeing memory allocator, and might even
have some fixes on some branch. But there might be other issues.

Thanks,
Guillem

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