unattended-upgrade crashed with SystemError in open(): E:Problem renaming the file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin.guEChP to /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - rename (2: No such file or directory), W:You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

[George Karavasilev]

I get this after every session startup in Ubuntu Gnome 14.10 (currently dev) with Gnome 3 PPAs (noth main and staging added).

ProblemType: Crash
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.10
Package: unattended-upgrades 0.82.8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-12.18-generic 3.16.1
Uname: Linux 3.16.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.7-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Sep 3 11:20:21 2014
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-08-03 (35 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" - Alpha amd64 (20140802)
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python3.4
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcCmdline: /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=linux
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/sh
PythonArgs: ['/usr/bin/unattended-upgrade']
SourcePackage: unattended-upgrades
Title: unattended-upgrade crashed with SystemError in open(): E:Problem renaming the file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin.guEChP to /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - rename (2: No such file or directory), W:You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UserGroups:

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Tim Landscheidt (scfc)]

We had this issue for some time now (cf. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T92491); I found bug #1091137 which says:

| When the landscape-client runs apt-get update, it can return an error like this:

| E: Problem renaming the file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin.PGPOhV to /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - rename (2: No such file or directory)
| W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

| This can happen if someone is running apt-get clean, while the update is happening. apt-get clean
| removes all pkgcache.bin files, including the temporary ones that apt-get update uses
| to rebuild the cache. This error is harmless, since pkgcache.bin should also have been
| removed, and thus the next time the cache will be opened the cache will be rebuilt.

| I.e, we should ignore the error above as to not cause intermittent alerts in the Landscape
| server, that the user can't do anything to resolve.

So my reading is that apt-get clean removes temporary files of another process, and it shouldn't do that (IMHO).

[Tim Landscheidt (scfc)]

Filed upstream at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=782501.