Debian Bug report logs - #16020
"Internal error. No arguments given for -e. Press Return."

Toggle useless messages

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

From: Martin.Gierich@stud.uni-karlsruhe.de (Martin Gierich)

To: submit@bugs.debian.org

Subject: dselect refuses installation

Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 19:48:59 +0100 (CET)

Package: dpkg
Version: 1.4.0.19

Note: This describes two installation tries.

After installing base1_3 (the base system) I tried to upgrade to libc6 using
dselect, but dselect installed libc6 and ldso in the wrong order (according
to mini-howto. Why is there no new base archive ?).

After fiddling around a bit with dpkg, I selected some more packages with
dselect and choosed install. But all dselect did was an error message like:
"Internal error. No arguments given for -e. Press Return.".

It would be a good idea to have a log feature in dselect, so error messages
would be saved on disk and I could include them here.

Does dselect make use of a scripting language for installing ? It is dammned
slow.


I formatted my hard disk and installed base1_3 again. After following the
libc6-mini-howto using dpkg, I used dselect and installed successfully about
10 packages. Then I wanted to install most of the standard installation.
When I chose "install" in dselect, the same error message as above appeared.

There is no way out of it, dselect does not work anymore !!!
Reinstalling dpkg and some other base packages does not help, I get this
error message again and again !

  /\/\            o o
 / __ \ artin      <
(_/  \_)         `---'

Message #14 received at 16020-done@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Bruce Sass <bmsass@shaw.ca>

To: 16020-done@bugs.debian.org

Subject: stale and incomprehensible after almost 9 yrs

Date: Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:05:56 -0700

tags 16020 moreinfo unreproducible

I have gone back into the archives, dug out the source for versions 
1.4.0.8 and 1.4.0.23.2 of dpkg (Bo and Hamm, respectively) and searched 
for messages similar to that reported---none were found. I looked at 
all use of "-e" in the dpkg source tree and fetched the old versions of 
those commands, searched for but could not find any similar messages in 
them or libs they linked with (specifically: sed, perl, and libc).

So, given the age of the report, the lack of any clue as to where the 
message was coming from, the fact that reinstalling dpkg (and 
presumably dselect) did not get rid of the problem, the problem arose 
after being hit by a known bug (#4448) and some manual mucking about, 
and that no similar reports exist in spite of "dselect does not work 
anymore !!!" (which would be a rather serious problem)... it seems like 
the choices are to either leave the report open, probably forever, or 
to close it and hope it never reappears.


- Bruce

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