Ubuntu-devel-discuss Digest, Vol 36, Issue 10

[Michael Vogt]

On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 10:38:35AM +0200, Davyd McColl wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:07:58 +0100, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> 
> > I don't think that the OP provided enough information to understand
> > what went wrong during his upgrade; it does seem that he may have tried
> > update-manager first and resorted to the manual process only once it
> > failed.

First and foremost I'm sorry that you had such a bad upgrade
experience. We work hard to make it smooth and painless and take the
bugs/issues very seriously.
 
> Apologies if I wasn't quite clear -- I have been known to ramble a little.
> At the risk of once again flooding the mailing list with useless information
> (sorry!), here is the sequence of events leading up to the issues at hand:
> 
> 1) Notice update-manager icon in the tray; clicky!
> 2) Get update-manager screen telling me that I have about 4 packages that
> may be updated.
> 3) Update-manager refreshes to show the "New release available frame". Like
> an OCD spider-monkey on crack, I click on that thing!
> 4) Another dialog pops up, starting the upgrade process that I've been
> accustomed to (downloading scripts, etc)
> 5) This dies ): No idea why, really. Just death, cold, alone, and without so
> much as a crash report.

If you still have access to the logs, could you please report a bug or
mail me the content of /var/log/dist-upgrade/* ? I would really like
to know what happend there. Given that your sources.list got udated
(see below) I'm pretty sure there is useful log information available.

> 6) I re-launch update-manager from the tray icon, to find that I now have in
> the order of 1000 packages that can be "upgraded". The "update to new
> release" frame doesn't re-appear. For all intents and purposes, it appears
> as if my machine has been morphed into a Koala with some negative karma
> points and a lot of upgrading ahead. I'm not daunted -- this looks like what
> I would expect if I were to manually edit my sources and do a dist-upgrade.
> So I click on "update"
>
> 7) After some time, the libc6 issue appears, asking me, via standard
> gtk-style deb messages, to restart, amongst other things, gdm. At this
> point, I drop out to a VT, stop gdm myself, and progress with apt-get
> dist-upgrade, thinking that the package manager for libc6 is probably a lot
> smarter than me and has his/her reasons for requesting a restart of gdm, as
> well as realising that if I don't do this in a VT, I have an endless loop
> ahead of me.

So you stopped it and killed the session (that update-manager was
running in) yourself? It was not the upgrade process that kicked you
out? I assume you answered "no, please stop the upgrade" at the
debconf prompt? I see that you reported bug #471436, I assume the
pre-isnt exit there (comment #2) is the result of clicking cancel).

> 8) rounds of apt-get dist-upgrade interspersed with apt-get install -f until
> things seem calm. The occasional dpkg --purge of conflicting packages that I
> don't essentially need (indi and d4x come to mind) and some manual fixing
> for packages with bad post-install scripts (wicd comes to mind)
[..]

Thanks, indi and wicd have no open bugs about this it seems, could you
please report them and include the failure? 

Please also file a bug about the grub problem, with the apt terminal
log included. I suspect that grub somehow got removed during the
upgrade but the logs should give us more details.

Thanks,
 Michael