Error messages lost with "do-release-upgrade --frontend=DistUpgradeViewNonInteractive"

[R. Diez]

I just tried to upgrade my Ubuntu 20.04.5 to 22.04.1 with:

do-release-upgrade --frontend=DistUpgradeViewNonInteractive

I wanted a non-interactive upgrade because the repeated prompting makes the process take a long time (I wasn't looking at the terminal the whole time).

The non-interactive upgrade failed straight away. The reason was that there was not enough space in the /boot partition/mountpoint, so I had to manually remove some older Linux kernels (not so intuitive).

The problem with the command above is that the error message about the lack of enough disk space under /boot was not shown. Apparently, the DistUpgradeViewNonInteractive frontend hides such error messages. There wasn't even an indication of an error, the upgrade processs just stopped. I saw the error message when I ran "do-release-upgrade" without the --frontend argument.

Option "--frontend=DistUpgradeViewNonInteractive" should not interfere with such error messages.

[Nick Rosbrook (enr0n)]

I believe errors in non-interactive mode are still logged to /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log (your failed attempt would be in /var/log/dist-upgrade/<date of failed attempt>/main.log.

[R. Diez (rdiezmail-ubuntu)]

That is true. In my case:

/var/log/dist-upgrade/20221017-1043/main.log

2022-10-17 10:42:19,766 ERROR Not enough free space: ['/boot']
2022-10-17 10:42:19,767 ERROR Not enough free disk space The upgrade has aborted. The upgrade needs a total of 426 M free space on disk '/boot'. Please free at least an additional 34,0 M of disk space on '/boot'. You can remove old kernels using 'sudo apt autoremove' and you could also set COMPRESS=xz in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf to reduce the size of your initramfs. (None)

But this is not really user friendly. Such errors should also be output to the console (stderr). Otherwise, it's head-scratching time.