Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock
Metadata
Current evaluation
PR #745 (merged as b1adccd5) stopped routine APT cache updates via craft-providers 1.2.0, but one lock race recurred in 2.1.0 before the report went stale.
Resolution: closed stale
Reason: The presumed fix was merged in PR #745 (commit b1adccd5; change 1b472c69), but a later 2.1.0 report showed the race was not fully eliminated. No further fix or maintainer resolution followed that October 2022 comment.
Evaluated by: mr-cal-bot
No scores available.
Issue body
This only happened to me once but hopefully the attached log would be helpful enough.
A pytest-operator integration test that I ran locally failed (only once so far) with:
```shell
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/tux/charms/karma-alertmanager-proxy-operator/tests/integration/test_charm_integ.py", line 24, in test_build_and_deploy
charm_under_test = await ops_test.build_charm(".")
File "/home/tux/charms/karma-alertmanager-proxy-operator/.tox/integration/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pytest_operator/plugin.py", line 357, in build_charm
raise RuntimeError(
RuntimeError: Failed to build charm .:
Packing charm 'karma-alertmanager-proxy-k8s_ubuntu-20.04-amd64.charm'...
Failed to install apt-utils.
* Command that failed: 'lxc --project charmcraft exec local:charmcraft-karma-alertmanager-proxy-k8s-56754252-0-0-amd64 -- env PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/snap/bin CHARMCRAFT_MANAGED_MODE=1 apt-get install -y apt-utils'
* Command exit code: 100
* Command standard error output: b'E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend. It is held by process 653 (apt-get)\nE: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is another process using it?\n' (full execution logs in '/home/tux/snap/charmcraft/common/charmcraft-log-8jlotfnh')
```
[charmcraft.log](https://github.com/canonical/charmcraft/files/7308622/charmcraft.log)
Evaluation history
| Date | Model | Scores | Action | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| stealth/space-bunny-alpha | — | closed stale | PR #745 (merged as b1adccd5) stopped routine APT cache updates via craft-providers 1.2.0, but one lock race recurred in 2.1.0 before the report went stale. | |
| stealth/space-bunny-alpha | — | closed resolved | PR #745 (b1adccd5) disabled automatic APT cache updates in build containers to avoid conflicts with ad-hoc apt-get; a rare lock failure still surfaced in Charmcraft 2.1.0. | |
| qwen3.6-35b-a3b-mtp-q6 | — | — | Resolved in PR #745 by skipping automatic APT cache updates in containers to prevent dpkg lock contention with ad-hoc installations. The fix is merged, though rare transient lock conflicts may still occur during concurrent operations. | |
| qwen/qwen3.6-35b-a3b | — | — | Fixed in PR #745 by disabling automatic APT cache updates in Craft Providers containers, preventing dpkg lock conflicts. Closed as resolved, though one intermittent retry occurred in v2.1.0. | |
| qwen3.6-35b-a3b-mtp-q6 | — | — | Fixed in PR #745 by caching APT updates instead of running them on every container launch, preventing dpkg lock conflicts. Closed as resolved, though rare intermittent recurrences were noted in later versions. |
Update history
No update history recorded yet.
Related work
-
Likely Fixed By:
canonical/charmcraft#745
(confidence 100%)
Merged as b1adccd5 and upgraded craft-providers to 1.2.0, which avoided updating the APT cache on every container use.
-
Related To:
canonical/craft-providers#104
(confidence 96%)
Tracked disabling automatic APT updates to prevent these dpkg lock failures.
Related issues
No related issues found above the similarity threshold.