[wpkg-users] wpkg.js hangs if error -1 is returned

[Pendl Stefan]

Rainer Meier wrote:

Hi Stefan,

Pendl Stefan wrote:
> Hi,
> I have some rare occasions, where the installer hangs due to an unknown reason.
> The installer times out on itself and returns error code -1.
> Further installations will run correctly, but the wpkg.js script will wait till the build in one hour timeout, after the wpkg.xml file is written successfully on the client.
>
> Configuration:
> WPKG Server 1.0.2
> WPKG Client 1.3.8
> Installation at shutdown

So it looks like the instller itself is broken (or just takes too long).
Actually from your description it's not clear to me what the problem is
regarding WPKG. It seems to be clear that the problem is within the installer.
So you have three options:
- Fix up your installer to make it run through normally (preferred solution)
- Set lower (some minutes?) timeout on install command, so WPKG quickly times
out and continues
- Set higher (how long does it need to complete?) timeout to make the command
complete.


Most probably your installer is hanging because it's displaying some interactive
dialogs and waits for user input. You should try finding out what makes it to
display this dialog and how to ensure it's not doing this.
For example some installers always ask interactively if a previous version
should be removed. In such cases it sometimes helps to uninstall the previous
version before attempting to install the new version.

br,
Rainer

________________________________



Hi Rainer,



sorry, should have been more specific, but was in a hurry.



Now the full story:



On one machine VLC player was installed not to the default location, so removing it did not work.

The installer displayed the dialog to remove the previous installer.

The install command has a timeout attribute attached, so the installer was killed after 5 minutes and returned error -1.

The wpkg.xml file was successfully written to disk about one minute after the VLC installer was killed.



I am installing at shutdown to avoid any problems and to avoid annoying the users.



The shutdown was happening exactly one hour afterwards.



I expected the machine to shutdown directly after the wpkg.xml file was written to disk, as it usually does.



---

Stefan