can't upgrade from LTS-2 or LTS-3 to LTS

[Achim Behrens]

A user in #ubuntu complained about no beeing able to upgrade his EOL 15.04 (cloud) server install, so i made a 15.04 server install in vbox to test this scenario, and he is right:

Running "sudo do-release-upgrade" results in:
"An upgrade from 'vivid' to 'xenial' is not supported with this tool."

An EOL Upgrade with changing the sources.list to use the old-releases doesnt work since vivid is not moved to the old-releases yet: http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/ .

[Achim Behrens (k1l)]

Ok, now i just tested a "sudo do-release-upgrade -d" which seems to work.

But this is a total desaster and must be solved differently. There are too many bad howtos out there alread telling every user just to run the -d upgrade which results in users ending up on devel releases when the dont want to because most people dont know what the -d is for.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

ubuntu-release-upgrade includes configuration files regarding the releases for which it supports upgrading from and to. Currently, there is support for upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04 and 15.10 to 16.04. We could add support for upgrading from 14.10 and 15.04 to 16.04.

[Achim Behrens (k1l)]

there are still users showing up with 15.04 ubuntu releases in use in #ubuntu. Telling them to use the -d switch is still the wrong way.

Why was vivid and wily not added to the http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ repo? that would give the user the chance to do the EOLupgrade like it used to be and shown here: http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

[Kevin (kevin999)]

Same question as Achim Behrens.

[Moshe Caspi (mcaspi12)]

Same question as Achim Behrens. Stuck on 15.04.

[flohack (flori-bin)]

Still no solution for this? Stuck on my server with 15.04...

[Chaffra Affouda (chaffra)]

I am having the same problem. Is there a possible solution beside a complete reinstall?

[Miro Janosik (miro-janosik-geo)]

I have the same problem right now, I went through multiple how-to's and none works... stuck on 15.04, and I want to update to anything usable.

[Achim Behrens (k1l)]

people still running on 15.04, which End of Life was February 2016, really should consider to do a fresh 16.04 LTS install now and stay on LTS versions when they dont want to upgrade every 6 months.

But dealing with those upgrade situations should still be considered from the ubuntu side. Like the solution to create an direct upgrade path to the next LTS like said by #2

[Iain Lane (laney)]

(cleaning up ~ubuntu-release bugs)

I don't think there's anything for the release team to do right here, so I'm unsubscribing the team. This would probably be for Brian or the foundations team to fix if they decide to do so - or of course anybody else could come to contribute a solution.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

As an example looking at the Ubuntu 18.04 dist-upgrader tarball it is possible to upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu 17.10 to Ubuntu 18.04. It should be fairly simple to add support to upgrade previous EOL releases (e.g. 17.04) to Ubuntu 18.04 and that would be a good service to provide.