"Aborting downgrade from (at least) 5.5 to 5.1" when installing 5.5.12

[Bart Verwilst]

Preparing to replace percona-server-server-5.5 5.5.11-rel20.2-115.lucid (using .../percona-server-server-5.5_5.5.12-rel20.3-118.lucid_amd64.deb) ...
 * Stopping MySQL (Percona Server) mysqld [ OK ]
Aborting downgrade from (at least) 5.5 to 5.1.
If are sure you want to downgrade to 5.1, remove the file
/var/lib/mysql/debian-*.flag and try installing again.
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/percona-server-server-5.5_5.5.12-rel20.3-118.lucid_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
 * Stopping MySQL (Percona Server) mysqld [ OK ]
 * Starting MySQL (Percona Server) database server mysqld [ OK ]
 * Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables.
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Processing triggers for install-info ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/percona-server-server-5.5_5.5.12-rel20.3-118.lucid_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

# ls -al /var/lib/mysql/*.flag
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2011-05-25 00:21 /var/lib/mysql/debian-5.5.flag

[Marcus Bointon (marcus-synchromedia)]

I'd take a flying guess that something is matching the '5.1' in '5.5.12-rel20.3-118.lucid_amd64.deb' and thinks that we're installing 5.1.

[cheater (cheater00)]

I can confirm. Errors when upgrading AND when installing.

No other mysql-related software is installed, running the command

aptitude search mysql | grep "^i"

shows nothing, same if I search for "percona"

[cheater (cheater00)]

Looking over the thread I cannot believe this error exists since a month and a half with no resolution. Very disappointed. Will not consider further use of Percona products until not only this bug is fixed, the reason why it hasn't been fixed yet is disclosed and action is taken to prevent this from happening again. Here are several points to remember about this bug:

1. it means that no one can upgrade. Since a month and a half people are unable to upgrade in case gaping security holes show up.
2. it means that if you didn't have the skillset to compile from source, now in order to continue using percona products you need to hire an external developer. Inacceptable for both big and small projects alike, unless people like throwing money away
3. It means that anyone who wants their systems to be easily deployable (cluster/cloud usage) cannot do that anymore. Building stuff from source is not acceptable in this sort of situation
4. It means that if, in an attempt to upgrade you have uninstalled the package, you cannot install it anymore without further hacking, leaving the less skilled developers with a crippled project.

All of the above means that this is a crippling bug disabling a large amount of users and possibly meaning complete loss of functionality for some of them. Not handling this over an extended period of time is very bad - it's not fixed, there's not even a patch, no work-around, and it's not even assigned a severity grade at all!

Please advise about the right place to file a bug against this "management bug" in the Percona QA process, i'm not sure if https://bugs.launchpad.net/percona-projects-qa is the right place, it seems related to some build tool. I would like to subscribe to this in order to find out whether Percona software is "safe to use" again.

[jjordaan (2111279-gmail)]

Why not do what the error tells you to do?
"If are sure you want to downgrade to 5.1, remove the file
/var/lib/mysql/debian-*.flag and try installing again."

# Move file
mv /var/lib/mysql/debian-5.5.flag /var/lib/mysql/debian-5.5.flag.1
# Install percona.
apt-get install -y percona-server-server percona-server-client
# Move file back
mv /var/lib/mysql/debian-5.5.flag.1 /var/lib/mysql/debian-5.5.flag

That should work.

[cheater (cheater00)]

You're joking me, right? You do realize the whole idea behind "packages" is automation, don't you?

[Stewart Smith (stewart)]

We currently have someone looking at a variety of packaging issues and hope to make a lot of progress over the next few weeks. Thanks for your patience, we've been really, really busy recently.

[Stephen Weeks (tene)]

This is a pretty trivial bug in the package's preinst script. Line 51 hasn't been updated for 5.5, and still says:

this_version=5.1

That should be sufficient to fix this issue. If you really want that as a patch instead, let me know. Hope that helps!

[Alexander Romanov (sannysoft)]

When this simple and extremely critical bug is going to be fixed?

[Shahriyar Rzayev (rzayev-sehriyar)]

Percona now uses JIRA for bug reports so this bug report is migrated to: https://jira.percona.com/browse/PS-483