OH3 "There was an error or interruption during the execution of..." solved

This thread is not to ask for support, but to mention how I solved an issue I had with OH3 when updating the packages to the most recent version. It may be useful for people having the same or similar problem.

To start with, I have a Raspberry Pi 3 running openHABian. I had previously upgraded OH from 2 to 3 and everything was working normally until one day I updated packages pending to be updated. After a while the update apparently crashed, but FireMotD didn’t report any packages pending to be updated. However, every time I tried to update any packages I received the following error message in openhabian-config:

There was an error or interruption during the execution of: │ │ "02 | Upgrade System"

Everything that I tried to update/install with openhabian-config instantly ended with the same error message.

I rebooted the Pi, checked the available space, searched for related topics in the forum, but nothing seemed to help. I couldn’t check the logs, because I haven’t been able to make OH log any errors (since I started with OH 2.0). I also read the documentation in

/opt/openhabian/docs/openhabian-DEBUG.md

but it seemed to be more related to new installs than to currently working setups.
I also checked the logs (as suggested in a thread) in

sudo journalctl -u openhab -b

but it mostly mentioned not being able to find or create the /var/log/openhab/openhab.log file and something with log4j.

However, by chance I tried to install a package from the command line and got this error:

E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run ‘sudo dpkg --configure -a’ to correct the problem.

so I executed the command

sudo dpkg --configure -a

Apparently there was some misconfiguration problem:

Setting up openhab (3.0.1-2) …

Configuration file ‘/var/lib/openhab/etc/log4j2.xml’
==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:
Y or I : install the package maintainer’s version
N or O : keep your currently-installed version
D : show the differences between the versions
Z : start a shell to examine the situation
The default action is to keep your current version.
*** log4j2.xml (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?

I typed Y, continued and after it finished setting up all packages everything went back to normal, and openhabian-config could successfully update all packages to their latest versions.

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