what to do if network connection breaks between an upgrade

[Alan Pope]

On 4 October 2010 13:43, Tapas Mishra <mightydreams at gmail.com> wrote:
> I edited the sources.lst changed lucid to maverick
>  and did apt dist-upgrade

That's not the way we recommend doing upgrades. We recommend using
update-manager or do-release-upgrade.

> it connected and started doing every thing .
> I have plans of doing this on other systems also in case if some thing
> goes wrong such as a power cut or
> network connection errupts in between or say I had to shutdown the
> machine or machine did reboot for some God knows reason
> then what step should I take to resume the upgrade from where it
> stopped or can I undo this entire thing.
>

You can't easily undo it once it starts. If it's still doing downloads
when the power/network goes then just restart it, but if the power
goes whilst packages are actually installing then the result depends
on which packages it's doing at the time. It's hard to give a blanket
answer to that question because upgrades can break in a bazillion
different ways depending on when it failed.

However in general if an upgrade breaks due to power loss, I'd boot up
and if you can get to a gui or console then use the package management
tools to continue what they were doing.

That said if you're asking this question then you're exactly the kind
of person who should _not_ be running Maverick (which isn't released
yet) as I specified in my previous mail.

Al.