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Introduction

This page described the current installation issues with the package ttf-mscorefonts-installer.

Description

We have received 150 reports about this package since the release of Karmic on Oct. 29th. This is a critical issue from a user experience point of view. So, I reviewed 345 installation failures of this package in Ubuntu (1 log file may contain many failures). Here are the results:

1. DNS Timout : 160 (46.36%)
   According to the comments, removing the option "--dns-timeout=10" and leaving the system defaults in update-ms-fonts seems to help.

2. Proxy URL http://:8080/: Invalid host name : 76 (22.03%)
   This is Ubuntu specific and reported here only for completness. This happens when the gconf key use_http_proxy = true and the user left the default values for the keys "host" and "port".
   The solution could be to unset http_proxy if the proxy address is invalid or prompting the user with msttcorefonts/http_proxy

3. Connection timed out : 39 (11.30%)
   Same category of issue as 1 but when connecting to the server. Removing the option "--connect-timeout=5" in update-ms-fonts and leave the system default value seems to help too.

4. Name or service not known : 15 (4.35%)
   Faulty DNS, badly configured local DNS or IPv6 enabled network. Not much to do here.

5. Checksum mismatch : 14 (4.06%)
   Some mirrors are sometimes returning partial content or HTML content (for instance biznetworks.dl.sourceforge.net)

6. The remaining errors are
   • HTTP Error : 13 (3.77%)
   • Various System Errors : 12 (3.48%)
   • Network error : 8 (2.32%)
   • User Interrupt : 8 (2.32%)

Fixing 1,2 & 3 would avoid a large part of the failures.

I've also check the dependencies on this package:

xubuntu-restricted-extras : Recommends
ubuntu-restricted-extras : Recommends
playonlinux : Suggests
kubuntu-restricted-extras : Recommends
wine1.2 : Recommends
wine : Recommends
user-he : Suggests
libphp-jpgraph : Depends
latexdraw : Suggests
jclic : Suggests
freevo : Suggests
eeepc-acpi-scripts : Suggests
openoffice.org : Recommends
gnumeric : Suggests

There is only 1 package that really depends on msttcorefonts. Furthermore, it will only result in bad rendering for some apps if the fonts are not installed. That's far from unusable.

Fix proposal

1. We could mimic the behaviour of flashplugin-installer. The function fp_exit_with_error notifies the user of the failure, set some debconf values, and exit with 0 but it doesn't fails the whole upgrade.
   In this case the fonts are not installed but do we expect from ttf-mscorefonts-installer to install the fonts or to install the installer ? In the latter the installation succeeded even if the installation of the fonts didn't.

2. When a mirror fails and a font fail to download from all mirrors, then the others fonts are not downloaded and a failed mirror is not retried. Switching the 2 nested loops will fix it
3. The proxy is stored in a debconf variable. If it is wrongly set we never give a chance to the user to change it. First step is to check for a valid proxy address, the second step will be to remove this setting and rely on the system's configuration.