Upgrade fails on systems with ubuntu-minimal package

[Eric Riese]

I installed Ubuntu originally with a server iso in order to have a custom LVM configuration, then I installed the `ubuntu-desktop` package. This is my laptop but I did the same thing on my desktop and encountered the same issue with this upgrade from Cosmic to Disco. That upgrade was rough. It got stuck so I did a force shutdown and several rounds of `sudo apt -f install`, `sudo apt dist-upgrade` and reboot.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.10
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:18.10.11.9
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.18.0-25.26-generic 4.18.20
Uname: Linux 4.18.0-25-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu13.4
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
Date: Wed Aug 28 21:56:27 2019
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-05-23 (462 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180426)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/usr/bin/fish
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to cosmic on 2019-08-29 (0 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeAptlog:
 Log time: 2019-08-28 21:56:00.457472
 Log time: 2019-08-28 21:56:05.642572
 Log time: 2019-08-28 21:56:15.028363
 Log time: 2019-08-28 21:56:30.412698
VarLogDistupgradeTermlog:

[Chris Guiver (guiverc)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 18.10 (cosmic) reached end-of-life on July 18, 2019.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Further there are many unofficial PPA's and no doubt unofficial packages, which should be removed prior to upgrade (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CleanUpgrade). These should be removed as per the error message you should have received (with suggestion to ppa-purge them).

Was your 18.10 system(s) fully upgraded before you attempted release-upgrade? If you'd like to remove the unofficial packages, and re-try and still have the problem - you can return the Status of the bug back to "New" when you comment the results of what you found. However given that 18.10 is now EOL and unsupported, unless it impacts the 19.04 to 19.10 upgrade path it may be marked "Won't fix".

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Looking at VarLogDistupgradeMainlog.txt in this bug report your /etc/apt/sources.list file contains entries with "deb mirror" in them. Currently, ubuntu-release-upgrader doesn't have code to handle those (see bug 1813354) so the upgrade would fail to calculate.