Failed upgrade from hardy->lucid

[Mario Limonciello]

Binary package hint: update-manager

When I was trying to upgrade, I received this error:

SystemError: E:Internal Error, Could not perform immediate configuration (2) on libc6

[Brian J. Murrell (brian-interlinx)]

Ahhh. Ditto. My package update is from March 6, 2010. Trying to use apt-get dist-upgrade:

...
559 upgraded, 159 newly installed, 16 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/358MB of archives.
After this operation, 357MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
E: Internal Error, Could not perform immediate configuration (2) on libc6

[Brian J. Murrell (brian-interlinx)]

Given I was able to reproduce simply with apt, probably this is not "update-manager" specific and needs to be reassigned somewhere else?

[Nathan Stratton Treadway (nathanst)]

I also got this error when running "do-release-upgrade -d" (for a Hardy->Lucid upgrade).

At that point, my /etc/apt/sources.list had already been updated to point to Lucid.

I tried starting up aptitude in interactive mode, and it immediately prompted me to resolve broken dependencies between libc6, locales, libc-bin, belocs-locales-bin, dpkg, and findutils.

One of the suggested solutions was to remove belocs-locales-bin and upgrade or install all the other affected packages, which seemed like a reasonable solution. So I tried running a command line "aptitude install libc6"... but that resulted in the same "Could not perform immediate configuration" error, even though aptitude was planning to upgrade and/or install all the interdependent packages.

After looking more closely at the dependencies, I noticed that the Lucid version of findutils actually depended on "dpkg (>= 1.15.14) | install-info" , so I figured it might avoid dependency loops with dpkg if I just instaled the install-info package . That comand completed without the "immediate configuration" error, and then I was able to install the Lucid version of findutils, again without error -- and then after that I was able to install the Lucid version of libc6 (and related package) successfully, too.

I have attached a log of the terminal session in which I ran those commands (cut-and-pasted from the xterm scrollback buffer, and with a few blank lines added between each "aptitude install" command to make it easier to follow).

I noticed that when I was done with all these steps, dpkg was still at the Hardy version... and also that the Lucid version of dpkg has a *Pre*-depends on "libc6 (>= 2.11)" -- presumably it's that pre-dependency that causes APT give up and abort with that "Internal Error".

It does seem like this particular error message (which appears to come out of the libapt-pkg-libc*.so file) could do a better job at explaining what exactly was wrong and how to fix it.... but at the same time it seems like upgrade-manager/do-release-upgrade will need to do something to resolve this situation as well, in order to support the full range of Hardy -> Lucid upgrades....

[Nathan Stratton Treadway (nathanst)]

(I should add that after running those manual package install/upgrades, I kicked off "do-release-upgrade -d" again, and this time it was able to proceed with the upgrade process.)

[Nathan Stratton Treadway (nathanst)]

It looks like this problem was just fixed in findutils 4.4.2-1ubuntu1....
From the changelog.Debian.gz file:

findutils (4.4.2-1ubuntu1) lucid; urgency=low

  * Don't depend on dpkg (>= 1.15.4) | install-info.
    The purpose of this dependency, pursuant to a "should" directive in
    policy, is to ensure that /usr/share/info/dir is properly rebuilt during
    upgrades. Unfortunately, this dependency introduces a loop on upgrades
    from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS that can't be broken without the use of
    --force-depends:
      libc6 Depends: findutils (>= 4.4.0-2ubuntu2)
      findutils Depends: dpkg (>= 1.15.4) | install-info
      dpkg Pre-Depends: libc6 (>= 2.11)
    Since it isn't the end of the world if the info directory isn't rebuilt
    when doing a partial upgrade of just findutils, this is the safest place
    to break that loop. We can drop this change after Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is
    released.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:15:12 +0000

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This problem should be indeed fixed with the findutils (4.4.2-1ubuntu1) upload.