ubiquity upgrade failed to restore applications

[Maxime R.]

I downloaded the desktop iso via bitorrent to upgrade my up-to-date 12.04.1 setup to 12.10.

I explained the process here : http://askubuntu.com/q/202694/7567
Basically, I did the following :

- booted on ubuntu-12.10-desktop-amd64.iso
- launched the installer (double click on desktop)
- selected "upgrade existing 12.04 install to 12.10"
- I did not select "download updates while installing" during the install in order to speed up the process, planning to do an apt-get update/upgrade after the reboot.

Result :

- I was asked to select my timezone & keyboard layout (those are already defined in the existing install)
- I was asked to create a new user: I gave my existing username & password (but that started to be puzzling)
- Install went fine till the end
- At the end Ubuntu told me having issues to "restore existing apps" and that I may need to reinstall some of them. The non-resizeable 2-lines terminal did not allow me to see what really happened. Sorry not to have collected more details about what seemed a small issue at that time.
- reboot

Then things gone wild, at that time I did not know that almost everything that wasn't in /home was overwritten with default values:
- /etc/default/grub was overwritten & I rebooted directly without asking the 3.6 kernel that I had installed to test some weeks ago
- no touchpad, usb mouse not recognized, X wasn't using the intel driver
- apt-get only knows linux-image-3.5.0-ubuntu although kernel 3.2, 3.5.0-ubuntu, 3.5.5 and 3.6 are installed and bootable.
- Ctrl+alt+T, tried to edit /etc/default/grub, vim is no longer installed.
- rebooted on the stock ubuntu kernel with sane options. Mouse & display are okay.

FWIW:
- almost every non-default program was wiped out: vim, git, tmux, chrome, chromium, dropbox, postgresql, etc.
- postgresql roles and databases were wiped out !
- all logs were wiped out, as stated in the bug summary below, there are no logs because it's "probably a fresh install" except it ain't.

My impression is that all this mess shouldn't have happened in the first place, when I
do an upgrade, I do an upgrade, not a wipe-everything-out-and-maybe-try-to-restore-what-was-there-before.

The main reason I went this way is that in my experience the normal process is awfully slow and has to be completed in one step compared to the (normally) straightforward download-iso-via-bittorrent / release-upgrade / reboot / update&upgrade.

Hope my feedback helps, no critical information was lost and now that I started to reinstall what I need to work, it's running fine.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:0.190.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-17.28-generic 3.5.5
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-17-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 19 15:10:39 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Release amd64 (20121017.5)
MarkForUpload: True
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

This seems to primarily be a documentation issue - that's more or less how this feature is expected to work, so if that's not what you as a user were expecting, we should do a better job of making it clear what will happen.

The one thing that I think is a bug is that you're only told about existing apps not being restored at the very end. We should detect this *before* wiping out the existing install and inform the user about what will happen, not wait until it's too late for the user to stop it.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Please note that Internet connection is required for using the Upgrade Option.
Did you mean to say that you did not select "Download updates" ?

apt-clone is used to upgrade inplace.

There should be an apt-clone tarball on your root partition in /ubiquity-apt-clone/apt-clone-state*.tar.gz

You can try unpacking and checking what's in the apt-clone tarball, and you can attempt recovery from it using apt-clone command line.

Not sure how late it is. but you should take backups.

Please run $ ubuntu-bug ubiquity to collect the relevant logs, such that we can troubleshoot what went wrong during in-place upgrade.

[Maxime R. (max.r)]

Thanks for the clarification.

Concerning the internet connection :
- the laptop was connected to the internet
- at this step: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall#Preparing_to_install_Ubuntu I did *not* check the "download updates while installing"
- I selected "upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10" at the next step

Did not know about apt-clone, interesting stuff, I found the install log in /var/log/installer. It's currently hosted there:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/97yl29hg8eubxoo/n2gwP5tb1L/var-log-installer
Seems like I recovered the package list of my old setup :)

The bug was captured at the end of syslog: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1290455/

Included attachement is the apport file of ubiquity.

[Maxime R. (max.r)]

FWIW, ubiquity complains a lot about "setting locale failed" and "not fully installed package" if that matters.
cf. around line 9950 in bug-ubiquity.apport

[Maxime R. (max.r)]

Some additional context :

Thing is: I'm using Ubuntu since 2007 and almost always used the alternate install downloaded via bitorrent when doing a release upgrade. Seems like this time there's no alternate install, only a desktop iso but seeing that booting it offered me to upgrade, my natural expectation was that it would work "as usual".

Clearly this should require a warning somewhere because wiping out system-wide configs, databases and logs can be troublesome even if all previous packages are correctly restored.

Obviously, not everyone will upgrade this way, but advanced while not expert users like me could easily fall in the trap. If I had seen the clear_partitions list http://paste.ubuntu.com/1290581/ I would probably have avoided it.

On the other side I must recognize the added benefit of a clean system pushing me to script my usual setup.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]