Upgrade 16.04 to 18.04

[Jeffrey Lane]

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 1:04 PM Daniel Llewellyn <diddledan at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sat, 2 May 2020 at 15:55, Jeffrey Lane <jeffrey.lane at canonical.com> wrote:
>>
>> This does not appear to be the case for me.  I've just recreated that
>> really quickly in my lab by installing a server with bionic and trying
>> to run do-release-upgrade on that.  With Prompt in release-upgrades
>> set to either lts or normal, I can't get do-release-upgrade to do
>> anything.
>>
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/1876420
>
>
> I think this is expected. LTS-to-LTS upgrades are usually delayed until the .1 release to allow the early-adopters to kick the tires before the LTS users make the jump. Until then you must do a multiple-hop upgrade. You should be able to upgrade to Eoan (19.10) and from there upgrade to Focal (20.04). To do that you will need to set `Prompt=normal`, which is normally set to `lts` when you first install an LTS release.

Perhaps.  But if that were the case, I would expect -d to still
upgrade to Focal as a "development" release when 'Prompt=lts' is set.
On the day AFTER release (Apr 24), I was able to initiate an 18.04 ->
20.04 upgrade using 'do-release-upgrade -d' and today, I am unable to
do so meaning if I WANT to update my bionic systems to focal now, I
have no mechanism to do so at all.  I should be allowed to hang
myself, accepting the risks of using -d in this context.

In other words,

Prompt=normal: `do-release-upgrade -d` should upgrade me from my
release to the next development release (as soon as the development
release is open for upgrading and testing).
Prompt=lts: `do-release-upgrade -d` should upgrade me from the last
LTS to the current LTS in the GA to .1 window, and once the .1 release
is done, then `do-release-upgrade` and `do-release-upgrade -d` should
function identically.

As it stands the only option I can think of currently to upgrade a
Bionic machine to Focal seems to be replacing all the bionic entries
in sources.list with focal entries, and hoping apt-get doesn't do
something silly.