Comment 30 for bug 349469

* In one of the dupes (#380491) the submitter says that running tasksel (not as root) simultaneously with "dpkg --configure --pending" (as root) results in the error message.

* In #419100 the submitter suggests that update-manager is conflicting with itself when spawned in "Automatic update / Install security updates without confirmation" mode.

* In #482523 the submitter says that the installer was also running.

* I am able to trigger the message ("debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable") by doing the following:

    while : ; do dpkg-reconfigure -pcritical <package-that-calls-debconf> ; done & update-manager # Then agree to Install Updates

#434286 also mentions use of dpkg-reconfigure.

(So far I have read the dupes up through the six hundred thousands.)

I agree with Steve Langasek who wrote in #18, "You should run into locking problems with either apt or dpkg well before debconf
is involved." Not only in the sense "I'd expect..." but in the sense "It would be better if...": the error messages printed by apt and dpkg are likely to give the user a better idea of what is going wrong (namely, that two processes are trying to carry out package management actions at the same time) than debconf's low-level "/var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process".

Can this+dupes therefore be considered bugs in dpkg-reconfigure, tasksel and other programs not taking the right locks?