upgrade manager removes all downloaded, pre-requested files upon failure

[FernanAguero]

[Upgrading from Ubuntu-7.10 to 8.04 using the 'Upgrade' button offered by Synaptic]

Upon starting the upgrade, Synaptic first downloads and launches an 'Upgrade manager' application.

The bug refers to this application.

The Upgrade manager does some preparation before starting and then proceeds to set new software channels and to download information from ubuntu repositories (package index files?).

In my case, after some 15-20 minutes of downloads, the upgrade failed because
ftp://ar.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-backports/Release.gpg
could not be downloaded.

If I start the upgrade again, I have to spend those 15-20 minutes AGAIN downloading all the same files I've downloaded a couple of minutes ago.

I have went through this three times, spending almost an hour, before I realized I could change the default repository (now the upgrade is going on fine).

Maybe the upgrade manager can be taught to keep the downloaded files for some time (perhaps setting a time-to-live for this files to something reasonable, like 15-30 minutes)?

This way, if something goes wrong, and we try to start the upgrade again, we don't have to download evrything again ...