An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade

[Teunis Peters]

This advice is bad. Because this release just got purged from sites, this is no longer possible to do:

* Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu
Please use the tool 'ppa-purge' from the ppa-purge
package to remove software from a Launchpad PPA and
try the upgrade again.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 19.10
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:19.10.15.4 [origin: unknown]
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.3.0-64.58-generic 5.3.18
Uname: Linux 5.3.0-64-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu8.9
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
Date: Sat Dec 12 16:15:41 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-03-09 (1009 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Release amd64 (20180105.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en_US
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to eoan on 2020-12-12 (0 days ago)

[Teunis Peters (teunis)]

I was also given no notice that the release was discontinued. It took a day of searching why I could not do "apt-get update" as every response came back 404 to figure this out.

[Chris Guiver (guiverc)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 19.10 (eoan) reached end-of-life on July 17, 2020.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test. If you then find the bug is still present in the newer Ubuntu version, please add a comment here telling us which new version it is in.

FYI: Notice of the upgrade offer is made, unless the owner/operator/someone-with-sudo access disabled it, or it was made and the operator dismissed it and selected not to be notified again.

FYI: 19.10 means the 2019-October release; adding 9 (months) to 10 (october) isn't difficult in calculating the EOL.

[Teunis Peters (teunis)]

I was using it because of company software that wouldn't work on useful.
But why did no notification of end of life happen on Dec 11 2020?
Why did everything just 404 with no explanation?
Why did I have to keep searching for mirrors until the updater would even process?
Why did the upgrade on December 12 2020 lock up and fail until I'd removed enough python 2.7 components?
And why would a completely unrelated package (camera driver) also block it?
And why did I have to go through a day's worth of websites and bug logs, postings and questions on stackoverflow to finally solve this?

Oh it is solved, but the eoan system updater is broken badly.
Also there is no upgrade path to a corporate LTS, for instance 18. (but then I can use it in LXC)

I've just had a really frustrating couple of days so I'm a bit upset. But then there isn't any distribution that properly supports laptops with touchscreens except this.

[Teunis Peters (teunis)]

If there's no notification on shell, then developers who are primarily shell based like me who block all notifications anyway will be missed.

[Teunis Peters (teunis)]

I'll put it in friendlier form:
- apt should have a notice
- dpkg-upgrade should function.

Those are the issues.
Breaking down why dpkg-upgrade failed meant randomly (or not quite randomly, I did read the log files for hints) removing system components until it functioned. As python is used for rather a lot, there was a risk of everything apt related failing at any point, and there was no direction to how to solve.
The process also removed a bunch of tools I use daily claiming "obsolete", but those could be reinstalled after. (as they are standard packages, not third party or outside repositories)

[Teunis Peters (teunis)]

Blocking packages:
python-gi
openscenegraph (and libraries)
libcamera-info-manager-dev (and dependencies)
libroscpp-dev
libxmlrpcpp-dev
libb64-dev

After that, upgrading was unblocked.
It doesn't make a lot of sense why the above would be a problem, except python-gi maybe as it was python2.7 dependent.
Most have since been reinstalled with newer versions. Somehow it couldn't detect this path, but there was no issue with installing the upgraded packages back in.

[Chris Guiver (guiverc)]

Mirrors are free to drop a release anytime AFTER the release reaches EOL.

The month is known (ie. 19.10 meant the 2019-October release, so it'll be 9 months after release date), though the EOL may not occur 9 months to the day, but between that date & end-of-the-month.

19.10 reached EOL, and was announced - https://fridge.ubuntu.com/2020/07/17/ubuntu-19-10-eoan-ermine-end-of-life-reached-on-july-17-2020/

meaning mirrors can drop the release the following day if they like, or any date after that. The main archive will also occur, as listed AFTER the release reaches EOL (ie. moved from archive.ubuntu.com to old-releases.ubuntu.com). There is no set date, except it occurs AFTER eol.

19.10 reached EOL long ago, the release name (19.10) makes the EOL easy to calculate, making it easy to schedule & plan when you need to release-upgrade (6-9 months after 2019-October), so your wasted time I'd see more as a management issue (lack of planning).

3rd party packages can use versioning tricks (higher values put on packages than what is actually enclosed) to ensure they install & replace official repositories, but this creates problems come release-upgrade time; thus the removal step (ppa-purge etc). (I'm assuming the camera package is 3rd party, but you gave no specifics)

Either way, unless problems exist in a currently supported upgrade path (eg. 20.04 release-upgrading to 20.10), eoan being EOL shouldn't have had any users for months now.

Note: this is my opinion (based on my Ubuntu knowledge).

To seek Support, you can use https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu. You can also find help with your problem in the support forum of your local Ubuntu community http://loco.ubuntu.com/ or asking at https://askubuntu.com or https://ubuntuforums.org, or for more support options please look at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/community-support/709

[Teunis Peters (teunis)]

That has a lot of assumptions, the chiefest being that said numbering and naming is public.
This is the first I've heard of it and I've been using ubuntu since somewhere around 7, after switching off of debian. Most of the third party sources are still back further.
In my case, I'd missed the notice likely because it showed up in the middle of a work deadline and got in the way and was dismissed, likely, then never saw another notice anywhere, so was suprised when everything apt-related stopped working without explanation or warning (404 code is neither), and that none of the related tools said anything other than host unreachable or file unknown.

So my suggestion is to have a warning printed out by apt or dpkg when running in a terminal about EOL / past EOL. Would be sufficient.

And then additional repeated surprises as the upgrade tool meant to solve this kept aborting, crashing and failing - which is where this bug report came from.

I am posting in the hopes some of the notes help someone else not waste two days of their life trying to debug this kind of mess, as it did me. And in the distant hopes someone will prevent this kind of failed upgrade path from either being known about or failing repeatedly from happening again.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubuntu-release-upgrader (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]