No mechanism to avoid inheriting crufty apt information from previous install whilst preserving /home

[Cefn]

At least one reason for upgrading is to get a clean system without the complexity of unusual builds provided by fringe PPAs or unusual packages. However, this seems to be impossible without a complete format of the '/' filesystem.

When trying to upgrade to 13.10 Gnome Saucy Alpha 1 I didn't choose the upgrade option (which offers to preserve personal files AND tries to preserve packages) but chose to do partitioning and configuration myself, attempting to simply preserve personal files (the /home folder) and to lose the previous package configuration.

After choosing a partition and mount point for '/' and choosing not to format (helping me preserve my home folders on the disk) the installer warned me that /var/ /usr/ and /etc/ would be lost during the install. This is exactly what I wanted - a clean system, yet this is not what happened.

After the install I found that the /etc/apt information had been preserved (with some modifications to the Ubuntu repositories only) and all kinds of software which was previously installed was attempted to be installed again.

Can an option be added for the installer NOT to try and preserve apt information and pre-existing packages. For many people this is exactly what they want when installing a new system.

Perhaps for this reason, during the install there was a failure managing the install, which accused the process of 'holding back' packages, perhaps because of the crufty config, meaning I don't know if the installer completed adequately.

A potential workaround is to mount the root partition, manually delete the /etc/apt folder, then unmount the filesystem, although this was impossible through Nautilus (I needed to drop to the command line and sudo the mount and removal).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: ubiquity 2.15.8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.9.0-7.15-generic 3.9.7
Uname: Linux 3.9.0-7-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.10.2-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
CasperVersion: 1.335
Date: Thu Aug 1 09:00:56 2013
InstallCmdLine: noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-gnome.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.lz quiet splash --
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu-GNOME 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Alpha i386 (20130626)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

It looks like apt-clone was run, to store apt sources & list of installed applications & it was restored on the new system at the end of the installation. I do not believe we currently provide methods to skip that step.

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. If you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running only once:
apport-collect https://api.launchpad.net/1.0/bugs/1207216

and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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