update-manager claims to do a release upgrade, but doesn't actually install packages

[Steve Beattie]

Binary package hint: update-manager

Starting from an 8.04.1 test installation with roughly ~2500 packages installed (including some KDE and xfce4 packages), running "sudo update-manager -d -c" walks through each of the steps of the upgrade, but the "installing packages" portion doesn't actually do anything, update-manager completes and shows the dialog to reboot, but the hardy versions of packages are still installed.

Attached are logfiles from /var/log/dist-upgrade/ and the output of dpkg -l

[Steve Beattie (sbeattie)]

Michael: as suggested on irc, I went ahead, verified that my apt sources were set to intrepid (the act of trying to use update-manager here leaves apt configured against intrepid already), did an 'apt-get upgrade', and then an 'apt-get dist-upgrade -f'. This successfully walked through the installation process[1] and updated the VM image to intrepid. I then reverted the VM snapshot that I'm doing this in and reproduced the update-manager behavior.

(I happened to notice that I had apt-listchanges installed; I uninstalled that package before running update-manager this time to ensure that it wasn't the culprit.)

Please feel free to let me know what else I can do to assist in debugging this. Thanks!

[1] Well, it wasn't exactly successful, as the upgrade failed on updating a couple of packages: opencryptoki and moodle, but it did actually install packages as expected.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Hi Steve,

Take a look at bug 283642. I don't know at all if it's related or not but the symptoms are very close and I've seen from your log file that etckeeper is installed on your system too

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I think this is caused by etckeeper, I will debug further.

[Steve Beattie (sbeattie)]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 09:45:38AM -0000, Michael Vogt wrote:
> I think this is caused by etckeeper, I will debug further.

I can confirm that purging etckeeping causes the bug to not be triggered
here. Note that it needs to be purged and not just removed; post removal,
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/05etckeeper still exists and still causes problems,
despite it containing tests for the existence of /usr/bin/etckeeper
within.

--
Steve Beattie
<email address hidden>
http://NxNW.org/~steve/

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I managed to reproduce this in a VM and I uploaded a fix. Please check if it fixes the issue for you as well (1:0.93.26)