Comment 0 for bug 1882069

I encountered this bug when execution do-release-upgrade on an Ubuntu 19.10 machine.
The release upgrade crashed ungracefully not calling abort() which should rollback all changes up to that point.
So I ended up with kind of a broken packages and configuration hell on my server machine.
I finally was able to perform the release upgrade by using apt / dpkg manually and resolving package dependencies and conflicts by hand.

The bug is on actually two places:

DistUpgradeController.py (parameter devRelease not set at all due to wrong indendation of else block)

DistUpgradeCache.py (using unsafe code within except block: accessing undefined key 'devRelease' and provoke KeyError)

In general: the idea of except or catch or whatever is not just execute different code logic in case of exception. It is about doing the most basic stuff in case anything goes wrong (which should be as exception (error) safe as possible)

Bad practice:

try
  doSomething();
catch exception
  ignoreException();
  doSomethingElse();

Good practice:

try
  doSomethingUnsafe();
catch exception e
  logAndHandleException(e);
  useAnotherTryIfAdditionalLogicIsRequired();

That kind of bad structure costed me 1 day of error analysis (I am not a python guy) and another 1 day to revert the things from the failed upgrade.

The bugs:

Since I can not find any source code git repository, the next lines target the python module which can be found in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/DistUpgrade (Ubuntu 19.10 / Ubuntu 20.04 LTS)
(line numbers may differ)

Major Bug:

DistUpgradeController.py:138-139 (wrong indentation of else block)

Current:
        if self.options:
            if self.options.devel_release:
                self.config.set("Options","devRelease", "True")
        else:
            self.config.set("Options","devRelease", "False")

Should be:

        if self.options:
            if self.options.devel_release:
                self.config.set("Options","devRelease", "True")
            else:
                self.config.set("Options","devRelease", "False")

Minor Bug:

DistUpgradeCache.py:651-694 (except block)

Error arised in lines 667-668

            elif self.config.get("Options", "foreignPkgs") == "False" and \
                self.config.get("Options", "devRelease") == "True":

cause "devRelease" was not set on "Options" (see Major bug)
except block should not excecute unsafe code cause its job is error handling and roll back.
please make the entire block more fail safe (also use additional "try" if neccessary)
Since it seems like that accessing keys in python is not safe (reminds me of javascript)
it should be always checked if the key does even exist before accessing it.

Thanks for taking care of that.

Edit: I found the attachment feature after writing this report so please find the DistUpgradeController.py attached containing the major bug.

Please keep me up to date
<email address hidden>

Best Regards