do-release-upgrade daemontools-run fatal error

[Brian Morris]

It's not clear where the bug is in this, but I was doing a LTS release upgrade and svscan was already installed and running, but when the upgrade tried to set up the new one the old one was still running so it failed with a fatal error. Even after manually editing inittab to disable svscanboot and killing the old one it would always restart and the dpkg reconfigure would never complete successfully. Once I rebooted the system, then everything was working and the reconfigure completed without an issue.

Here is the end of the console output for the upgrade:

Processing triggers for libapache2-mod-php7.0 (7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.2) ...
Warning: Could not load Apache 2.4 maintainer script helper.
Processing triggers for dbus (1.10.6-1ubuntu3) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 daemontools-run
Error in function:

A fatal error occurred

Please report this as a bug and include the files
/var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log and /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log in
your report. The upgrade has aborted.
Your original sources.list was saved in
/etc/apt/sources.list.distUpgrade.

SystemError: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Could not install the upgrades

The upgrade has aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A
recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a).

Please report this bug in a browser at
http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+filebug
and attach the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/ to the bug report.
installArchives() failed

Setting up daemontools-run (1:0.76-6ubuntu1) ...
start: Job is already running: svscan
dpkg: error processing package daemontools-run (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 daemontools-run

Upgrade complete

The upgrade has completed but there were errors during the upgrade
process.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

I went through the LTS upgrade on some Ubuntu Server machines w/o this error from 12.04 to 14.04. Going through the LTS upgrade on the first of the same systems from 14.04 to 16.04 I too am seeing this error.

I believe daemontools-run is used by djbdns, which our systems run.

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

I got the package situation resolved that was caused due to performing a 14.04->16.04 LTS upgrade.

I removed the following packages:
dnscache-run
daemontools-run

Then reinstalled them from the raw .deb files I had downloaded to the server.

$sudo dpkg -i daemontools-run_0.76-6ubuntu1_all.deb
$sudo dpkg -i dnscache-run_1.05-8ubuntu1_all.deb

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

@ the OP: "It's not clear where the bug is in this, but I was doing a LTS release upgrade and svscan was already installed and running"

I would think the bug should be against the daemontools-run package, that it is unable to apply an update to itself. Correct?

Seems to me a regression from the 14.04 package, which was able to update the 12.04 version during the LTS upgrade process.