[Bug 1453740] Re: do-release-upgrade crashes with message : "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xae in position 337: invalid start byte"

[Robert Krambovitis]

I just encountered this issue when trying to update a trusty server to xenial.
Here's how we "resolved" it.

After do-release-update exited with a similar to the above message, there is a temporary ubuntu-release-upgrader-{random} left over in /tmp.
Enter that directory i.e. cd /tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-asd123
edit DistUpgradeCache.py
Head down to def installedTasks(self)
after the line that reads:  "for pkg in self:"
add logging.debug("%s \n" % pkg)
You need to make sure this is indented with spaces to the same level as the next line.

save / exit, then run (assuming you are upgrading to xenial)
./xenial

When it crashes this time, you can view /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log
and see which was the last package processed that caused the crash.
Remove this package, then proceed with do-release-upgrade as normal. In
our case it was a very old wowzaServer package.

This is obviously not a fix, but it got the job done :)
Hope this helps.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1453740

Title:
  do-release-upgrade crashes with message : "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8'
  codec can't decode byte 0xae in position 337: invalid start byte"

Status in update-manager-core package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  for dist upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to the next "normal" release, when I make a do-release-upgrade -d, I get this error :
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xae in position
  337: invalid start byte
  I have cleaned all the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
  but no change in order to remove all unencoded characters like accent etc...

  # lsb_release -rd
  Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS
  Release:        14.04

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