upgrade from 9.04 - 9.10: the most broken Ubuntu / Debian upgrade I have ever experienced

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 16:37 +0200, Davyd McColl wrote:
> I'll try keep it short, because this mail doesn't contain anything
> particularly constructive

Hi Davyd.  I'm sorry you had such a bad experience.  I've done one fresh
install and two upgrades from 9.04 to 9.10, and I've not had any
problems with any of them so far (and these are not simple systems: my
two upgrade systems both use nVidia cards with proprietary drivers and
dual monitor support, I have a lot of *-dev etc. packages installed on
both of them, some PPA packages, etc. etc.)  There are also another 5-6
people at my office who did upgrades and I didn't hear any problems
there either (and I would definitely hear about it).

One thing I was sure to do was make sure all my packages on 9.04 were up
to date and I had performed any system reboots required before I started
the upgrade.

One thing I noticed in your email is you had a lot of references to
running "apt-get dist-upgrade".  I guess (it wasn't entirely clear) that
you started with update-manager (as you know, this is the only
tested/supported way to upgrade Ubuntu releases: you cannot use raw
apt-get or aptitude) and switched to apt-get once it failed with the
libc issue.  It seems likely to me that this initial failure, and the
inability to use update-manager to complete the upgrade process, might
have led to some of your other issues in a "cascading failure" effect.

Since none of my installs/upgrades ran into the issues you saw (problems
with libc6 upgrades requiring the restart of GDM, etc.), I don't think
we can fairly categorize them as "glaringly obvious" and the Ubuntu QA
as worse than the "most incompetent".  In fact, libc updates happen all
the time, even security and bug fix upgrades during a normal release,
and they don't run into this problem just as I didn't.  Upgrading libc
is a well-understood and managed procedure.  The reality is there was
something different about your system that caused it to fail in this
way, and we don't know what it was.  If your colleague experienced the
same problem then likely it was something common to your systems, that
is not common to other systems.

I'm surprised about the boot problems, since an upgrade path from 9.04
to 9.10 does NOT replace GRUB with GRUB2 automatically.  On my upgraded
systems I'm still using the old tried and true GRUB and GRUB2 is not
installed.  Only on fresh installs will GRUB2 be used.