dist-upgrade failed in many unpredictabl ways

[Davide Prati]

I haven't find a better place to report my experience, without any doubts the worst dist-upgrade since 8 years. I have finally fixed everything but it was a real pain. I will describe here what went wrong, in the hope that the next dist-upgrade will be better.
- I have launched the upgrade from command line apt dist-upgrade as the GUI tool was not doing nothing, not event reporting a message. There was a packet holding back, I have uninstalled it with synaptic and then apt dist-upgrade started

- The boot failed. I have looked in the log and an apparmor profile was blocking the boot, because one file could not be parsed. The error was in the mysql file that can not be parsed. I have moved this in another folder and this error message was gone.
- Still the boot did not start. I was thinking that maybe some package is misconfigured, I have run apt update but there was no internet connection, and ifconfig was telling me that net-tools were not installed. I have entered rescue mode, I have re-anabled the networking, then check the dependency, and then the boot started.
- But still, the computer was booting just in rescue mode. I have looked into the logs (because the journalctl command was not reporting any failure) and I have seen that a partition could not be found. It was an nfts partition that I have created to share data between ubuntu and windows (I have a dual boot installation). I have commented out that line in /etc/fstab and it worked. But stil I did not understand why it can not be read anymore. ntfs-3g and fuse are installed, it should work as before.

Anyway, to recap:
1) graphical upgrade tool was not able to report which package was holding back the upgrade process
2)the mysql file in snap can not be parsed and that blocked the boot, measure a bit too excessive IMHO
3)network was unreacheable because some basic programs were uninstalled
4)NFTS partition was unreadable and the journalctl command, was not reporting the name of the failed partition

Now everything works again and looks good, except the nfts partition. I do not think this is the right place were to report my upgrade experience, but I think it might be helpful to improve our beloved Ubuntu.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:22.04.15
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.15.0-58.64-generic 5.15.74
Uname: Linux 5.15.0-58-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu82.3
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CrashDB: ubuntu
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Mon Jan 16 09:52:14 2023
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-12-02 (1870 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Release amd64 (20171018)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: dist-upgrade
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
VarLogDistupgradeAptHistorylog:
 Start-Date: 2023-01-13 17:04:34
 Install: libgc1:amd64 (1:8.0.6-1.1build1, automatic)
 Upgrade: guile-2.2-libs:amd64 (2.2.7+1-4, 2.2.7+1-6build2)
 Remove: libgc1c2:amd64 (1:7.6.4-0.4ubuntu1)
 End-Date: 2023-01-13 17:04:36

[Nick Rosbrook (enr0n)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I think it would be more helpful if you created separate bugs for each of the problems you experienced, each assigned to the appropriate package. As it stands, this is not an actionable bug report. Please see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs for more information.

[Davide Prati (lastexxit)]

Hello Nick, thanks for your reply and your time. I totally get your point, and I see that there were many problems and that each of those problems could be an issue on the launchpad by itself. But on the other side, as user of Ubuntu, I did my best to write a report of what went wrong in the upgrade process, adding as many details as I can, and to see the report being discarded as "invalid" because it contains many failures is a bit disappointing. The dist-upgrade command is a trigger of many events anyway, and it is possible that some of those events are not successful.
Again, I totally understand your point and I will start looking for similar issues on the launchpad , but I am not sure this is the proper way to handle users feedback regarding the upgrade process.

[Nick Rosbrook (enr0n)]

The reason this is "invalid" for ubuntu-release-upgrader is that there does not appear to be any actionable information here that is specific to ubuntu-release-upgrader. It would be more effective if you opened a bug report against the appropriate package for each of the issues you experienced. I will try to provide a bit more direction to help you create bug reports that can potentially be investigated further.

> - I have launched the upgrade from command line apt dist-upgrade as the GUI tool was not doing nothing, not event reporting a message. There was a packet holding back, I have uninstalled it with synaptic and then apt dist-upgrade started

Which package was causing this problem? What do you mean by "holding back"? If you believe $PACKAGE was causing update-manager to fail, please open a bug report against $PACKAGE describing the issue.

- Still the boot did not start. I was thinking that maybe some package is misconfigured, I have run apt update but there was no internet connection, and ifconfig was telling me that net-tools were not installed. I have entered rescue mode, I have re-anabled the networking, then check the dependency, and then the boot started.

I'm not sure there are enough details for me to point you in the right direction here. But if you can figure out what package was causing the problem, you can open a bug report against that package.

> - The boot failed. I have looked in the log and an apparmor profile was blocking the boot, because one file could not be parsed. The error was in the mysql file that can not be parsed. I have moved this in another folder and this error message was gone.

Was the file /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/mysql? What was the error? If you can provides those details, you should open a bug against the apparmor package.

> - But still, the computer was booting just in rescue mode. I have looked into the logs (because the journalctl command was not reporting any failure) and I have seen that a partition could not be found. It was an nfts partition that I have created to share data between ubuntu and windows (I have a dual boot installation). I have commented out that line in /etc/fstab and it worked. But stil I did not understand why it can not be read anymore. ntfs-3g and fuse are installed, it should work as before.

Without logs, it is hard to immediately tell which package to blame for this. A good start would be to open a bug against systemd (because it parses /etc/fstab to generate mount units), and describe your partition scheme, and what entry from /etc/fstab had to be removed to fix the system.

Hopefully this helps.

[Davide Prati (lastexxit)]

Many thanks for your detailed reply Nick, this is really helpful. I have looked in my firefox history and I have found the name of the package (I was searching on google on my laptop while trying to fix my desktop).The package that was causing dependency problem in the first place was libdvd-pkg. I have removed it and then i was able to launch dist-upgrade.
Regarding the network error, simple tools like net-tools were not installed(but I am 100% sure they were there before the upgrading process). Unfortunately I am not able to collect more details about it.
The apparmor error was "Failed to start apparmor", I have found it in my firefox history. I do not remember the correct path of the mysql profile, I can not be 100% sure that it was /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/mysql but after I have removed the mysql profile I was able to get apparmor working. Probably this is a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/+bug/1861250 ?

Regarding the nfts partition, the message log that I have seen was "e2fsck: Cannot continue, aborting"

Also, I had also this https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ureadahead/+bug/1763584 during the upgrade process.