upgrade failing if packages have changed + been removed on the server while downloading

[Paul Sladen]

Binary package hint: update-manager

Updating a machine from 9.04 with:

  sudo update-manager -c -d

results in update-manager downloading several hundred megabytes and then erroring out on the last four files:

  ...
  ERROR:root:IOError in cache.commit(): 'Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/l/linux/linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic_2.6.28-15.51_i386.deb 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.140 80]
  Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/l/linux/linux-headers-2.6.28-15_2.6.28-15.51_all.deb 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.140 80]
  Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/l/linux/linux-headers-2.6.28-15-generic_2.6.28-15.51_i386.deb 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.140 80]
  Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/l/linux/linux-libc-dev_2.6.28-15.51_i386.deb 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.140 80]
  Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-intel/xserver-xorg-video-intel_2.6.3-0ubuntu9.4_i386.deb 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.140 80]
'. Retrying (currentTry: 2)
  ERROR:root:giving up on fetching after maximum retries
  none

My guess is that the published packages have been bumped in the mean time (manually looking in the FTP directory shows that '-15.52' is available, published earlier today.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

This is tricky to fix, especially on a devel release that is constantly on the move. One way would be to keep obsolete files on the server for a certain amount of time (couple of extra hours).

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

mvo: since it will be impossible for update-manager to proceed in this situation, at that point can't it just redownload the indexes, reanalysis the download situation and try again (a second, or even third round will be much progressively quicker since it's only indexes any remaining files).

...I think it should be safe to do this as it's only at the stage of downloading .debs and has not started the actual installation part

There didn't seem to be an obvious way to force update-manager that it should *ignore8 its cached idea of what might be on the servers. What determines how long update-manager keeps its cache of the next-distro indexes for?

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug #420009, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.