UnicodeDecodeError in checkFreeSpace on 13.10=>14.04 upgrade

[Odin Hørthe Omdal]

Steps:

 1. Use a locale that has an LC_NUMBER with a no-breaking space (or some other non-ascii character)
 2. Have too little space on one mount (for me it was /boot)
 3. Can't do release upgrade to 14.04 (well, not getting any error message)

I sent a patch upstream[0], but I don't know if it'll be accepted, and also, this won't really help unless the package is updated on the versions people upgrade from.

  [0] <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=750120>

I suggest instead that you code around it in the trusty upgrade script. The offending line is the apt_pkg.size_to_str(). Instead of using that bare, you should prepend a `.decode('utf-8')` to it.

I don't know where the code for that trusty tarball is held, so I don't have a patch. But I can do that if you tell me where. (should be a simple fix though).

-------

Some relevant log lines (and traceback) from this discussion <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2217609> (more data there)

2014-04-18 08:44:07,527 DEBUG dir '/var/cache/apt/archives' needs '1085247820' of '<DistUpgrade.DistUpgradeCache.FreeSpace object at 0x991214c>' (1245708288.000000)
2014-04-18 08:44:07,527 DEBUG dir '/usr' needs '1768633344' of '<DistUpgrade.DistUpgradeCache.FreeSpace object at 0x991214c>' (160460468.000000)
2014-04-18 08:44:07,528 DEBUG dir '/usr' needs '52428800' of '<DistUpgrade.DistUpgradeCache.FreeSpace object at 0x991214c>' (-1608172876.000000)
2014-04-18 08:44:07,528 DEBUG dir '/boot' needs '47136438' of '<DistUpgrade.DistUpgradeCache.FreeSpace object at 0x991214c>' (-1660601676.000000)
2014-04-18 08:44:07,528 DEBUG dir '/tmp' needs '5242880' of '<DistUpgrade.DistUpgradeCache.FreeSpace object at 0x991214c>' (-1707738114.000000)
2014-04-18 08:44:07,529 DEBUG dir '/' needs '10485760' of '<DistUpgrade.DistUpgradeCache.FreeSpace object at 0x991214c>' (-1712980994.000000)
2014-04-18 08:44:07,529 DEBUG dir '/tmp' needs '0.0' of '<DistUpgrade.DistUpgradeCache.FreeSpace object at 0x991214c>' (-1723466754.000000)
2014-04-18 08:44:07,529 DEBUG dir '/usr' needs '0.0' of '<DistUpgrade.DistUpgradeCache.FreeSpace object at 0x991214c>' (-1723466754.000000)
2014-04-18 08:44:07,530 ERROR Not enough free space: ['/']
2014-04-18 08:44:07,543 ERROR not handled exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/tmp/update-manager-WBPSvW/trusty", line 10, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())

  File "/tmp/update-manager-WBPSvW/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 243, in main
    if app.run():

  File "/tmp/update-manager-WBPSvW/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1827, in run
    return self.fullUpgrade()

  File "/tmp/update-manager-WBPSvW/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1780, in fullUpgrade
    if not self.askDistUpgrade():

  File "/tmp/update-manager-WBPSvW/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 988, in askDistUpgrade
    if not self._checkFreeSpace():

  File "/tmp/update-manager-WBPSvW/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 965, in _checkFreeSpace
    required.dir))

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Oh this may be the same bug as bug 1172740.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

You could test the fix by using the -p switch with do-release-upgrade.

[Odin Hørthe Omdal (velmont)]

Indeed it is a duplicate. The fix is just the hotfix I'd done myself if having that problem.

I'll link the debian bug in a comment on the other bug.