crashed during installing packages on upgrade vom hardy to intrepid beta (after about half of the packages had been upgraded)

[Ernst Kloppenburg]

Binary package hint: update-manager

hello!

about halfway through installing all the updates on an update from hardy to intrepid beta, after a long period without user interaction, problems began.

first, error dialogs were displayed for about 5 different packages with similar messages, approximately like "post-installation script for packages xyz failed with error 139"

then, suddenly, the update manager vanished

logs follow

[Ernst Kloppenburg (ernst-kloppenburg)]

while doing 'dpkg --configure -a' now, I get a lot of the following errors, which might be related.

*** stack smashing detected ***: /usr/bin/perl terminated

btw., are there any suggestions for getting out of this and completing the upgrade?

[Ernst Kloppenburg (ernst-kloppenburg)]

I found a related bug, 270626. They had a similar problem and traced it down to the debconf KDE frontend not working properly.

Thus my previous bug 283930 is also related (or duplicate?)

The base issue is to keep the debconf kde frontend working during an upgrade.

My suggestion for a solution is: get rid of all those debconf frontends an create an 'ubuntu' debconf frontend that has very few well known dependencies and works "always"

probably this bug and the two mentioned above should be set to critical (because they require a lot of patience on the upgraders side), and they should be reassigned to the debconf package

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

I switched the release upgrader to not use the kde frontend anymore during the ugprade. It will now default to "noninteractive".

[Ernst Kloppenburg (ernst-kloppenburg)]

in case other people have the same problem and read this, I would like to contribute here how I did proceed with my installation to recover from the problem:
- repeatedly called dpkg --configure -a until it succeeded
  (better would be to first edit /var/cache/debconf/config.dat as described in bug 270626)
- edit /etc/lsb-release and /etc/apt/sources.list back to hardy
- download and unpack http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/intrepid.tar.gz
- call ./intrepid

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package update-manager - 1:0.93.26

---------------
update-manager (1:0.93.26) intrepid; urgency=low

  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py:
    - workaround kde tmpfile permissions (LP: #277431)
  * UpdateManager/Common/utils.py:
    - do not crash if gconfd is not availabe/unusable
      (LP: #281248)
  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeViewKDE.py:
    - do not use "kde" frontend during the upgrade, it
      crashes because of the kde3->kde4 transition
      if run at the wrong time (LP: #283942)
  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeView.py:
    - ignore SIGPIPE when forking the Dpkg::Pre-Install
      scripts to fix error with etckeeper (LP: #283642)

 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:03:05 +0200

[Ernst Kloppenburg (ernst-kloppenburg)]

continuing the recovery notes:
after the upgrade is completed, apport will display a lot of errors concerning the inability to configure some of the packages.
call dpkg-reconfigure -p hight <packagename> for each of them manually
(or script it with the information from /var/crash)