Unhelpful error when selected Ubuntu mirror is unresponsive

[Johan]

Binary package hint: update-manager

Hi,

I'm using Kubuntu 7.10 (fr; fully up to date) and I try to upgrade to Kubuntu 8.04 (fr) with the Adept Updater (adept-updater 2.1.3ubuntu17.1) -> Distribution Upgrade.

During the process to update repositories list, when some repositories are not fetched, the Distribution Upgrade ends at this point, without answering any user-friendly report and what to do in that case. In the same time, the timeout seems to be very very long to get the error report (I had to wait nearly 10 minutes to get no answers from only 10 missing repositories!).

Should I have to manually comment these repositories in my sources.list? Should I have to wait for all repositories to be updated? I'm not a developper, just an end-user, what should I have to do?

Just for information, here is the error report that I get at the time of my bug report (fr):
"
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/Release.gpg Connexion à fr.archive.ubuntu.com: 80 (194.2.0.36) impossible, délai de connexion dépassé
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/i18n/Translation-fr.bz2 Connexion à fr.archive.ubuntu.com: 80 (194.2.0.36) impossible, délai de connexion dépassé
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/restricted/i18n/Translation-fr.bz2 Connexion à fr.archive.ubuntu.com: 80 (194.2.0.36) impossible, délai de connexion dépassé
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/universe/i18n/Translation-fr.bz2 Connexion à fr.archive.ubuntu.com: 80 (194.2.0.36) impossible, délai de connexion dépassé
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/multiverse/i18n/Translation-fr.bz2 Connexion à fr.archive.ubuntu.com: 80 (194.2.0.36) impossible, délai de connexion dépassé
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/Release.gpg Connexion à fr.archive.ubuntu.com: 80 (194.2.0.36) impossible, délai de connexion dépassé
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/main/i18n/Translation-fr.bz2 Échec de la connexion
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/restricted/i18n/Translation-fr.bz2 Connexion à fr.archive.ubuntu.com: 80 (194.2.0.36) impossible, délai de connexion dépassé
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/universe/i18n/Translation-fr.bz2 Connexion à fr.archive.ubuntu.com: 80 (194.2.0.36) impossible, délai de connexion dépassé
Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-backports/Release.gpg Échec de la connexion
"

Would it be possible to enhance error reporting for the Distribution Upgrade process?

Regards,
Johan

[Richard Birnie (rbirnie-deactivatedaccount)]

Thanks for reporting this. You raise a valid point. Regarding the length of the time out I know that the developer of update-manager is working on making this shorter in a future version. The particular error you are seeing is caused by a problem on the repository server, not something that update-manager can do a lot about. You shouldn't need to edit your sources.list update-manager does this for you and it looks like it has worked correctly. This is really seems to be a case of bad luck, the server may have been down or overloaded just at the time you tried to upgrade. However I agree that this could be reported better so I will add this to the wishlist. The best solution for this type of error is usually to just try again later

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

As shown in duplicate bug 528208, this doesn't apply just to dist-upgrade, but to any repository operation. That report also suggests inviting you to change to a more responsive server.