do-release-upgrade can't be continued after drop to shell

[Mike]

I'm attempting to run an upgrade from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS. I ran "do-release-upgrade -d" and after some time the process reported a conflict in a configuration file.

Selecting "drop to shell to examine differences" gave me a shell alright, but there were some odd issues with the TTY - line breaks not performing a carriage return and so on. Then typing "exit" to exit that shell exited the entire install process (which is running in tmux or screen or similar).

The end result is a half-installed system in an unknown state, with no obvious means of recovery, and I'm going to have to revert to backup. Consequently I can't give any useful information about version numbers, except all packages had been updated to the most recent in Lucid prior to upgrade.

I would STRONGLY suggest you provide an option to run "do-release-upgrade" without tmux or whatever it is, and/or provide an additional argument to "do-release-upgrade" which will allow you to reconnect to an disconnected instance.

Incidentally this was also reported by someone else here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1969849

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[mforbes (mforbes-physics)]

This still seems to be an issue 3 years later. Can someone in the know please update the status with this and/or suggest a direction to fix this?

[Shane DeMeulenaere (shanemd)]

Potential recovery:

For what it's worth. I just ran into this issue and recovered using reptyr. I had to build it from source from https://github.com/nelhage/reptyr though, as apt was locked up.

* run 'pstree -p' to find the PID to reconnect to. The tree looked something like:

  - trusty - ??? - bash - emacs

You want to PID of the leaf node here (in this case emacs)

* Then run 'reptyr PID'. This will land you back in your editor with potentially a bunged up terminal state (which is why you're in this mess to begin with). Exit your editor safely (in my case, emacs wouldn't accept C- commands, but handled ESC-x save-buffers-kill-terminal).

* Clean up whatever you were cleaning up (being careful of course)

* Run 'exit', as do-release-upgrade instructed

In my case, I was still slightly screwed because I messed up the pty of the 'trusty' process above while I was trying to figure this out. My apt and dpgk state was okay though, so I could just restart the upgrade. But I think this will allow you to resume your current release upgrade unscathed. I'd be interested to hear reports if anyone tries this.

Hopefully this helps someone!

[Shane DeMeulenaere (shanemd)]

For posterity, here's a cross reference to the forum post that landed me here: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1969849