update-manager did not clean up after dist-upgrade failed with minor problems

[Uphaar Agrawalla]

Binary package hint: update-manager

Hello,

When upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic, an error appeared during configuration of samba packages. This was normal since I had manually deleted the conf file for samba from /etc at some point and forgot to place it back. I wasn't aware that this would cause problems during the upgrade.

However, after failing at this point, the message appeared saying upgrade was not completed successfully. However, except for the 5 samba-related packages, everything was done. update-manager halted at this point and did not complete the remaining two steps:
Clean Up
Reboot.

I rebooted and got into Karmic just fine. I corrected the errors by restoring the samba conf file and running dpkg --configure -a.

The problem is that that clean up was never done, and I am left will all the stale packages from Jaunty.

I feel that update-manager should have completed all the steps and then gracefully exited with the error message. In this case because of a missing conf file it halted the process abruptly.

Log files from /var/log/dist-upgrade are attached.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Oct 6 00:29:18 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: update-manager 1:0.125.6
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.38-generic
SourcePackage: update-manager
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-11-generic x86_64

[to be removed (liw)]

The problem here is that update-manager can't really know the difference between "it's safe to continue upgrade even if some packages didn't upgrade properly" and "everything is broken, yikes, have to reinstall, hope you had backups".

It might perhaps be sensible to have it ask the user whether to continue or abort.

[Sam Freilich (l33tminion)]

I had the same problem. Is there a way to get dist-upgrade to go back to the steps it's missed?

[John Simmons (strannik-strannik)]

I also have this problem, and since the clean-up did not take place, I have almost no disk space left. Is there another way to get this done? the only package that failed is not critical, so I want to go forward (or all the way backward if that is not possible), but as it is now, the system is nearly unusable (due to the lack of space).

 I don't want to do a complete uninstall/reinstall unless that is the last possible resort, as it will take weeks to get all of the optional packages and configurations back the way it was. I'm running Wubi, and I was in the process of trying to figure out how to back up/restore *just* the wubi install without having to restore all of windows if something like this happened - I guess I should have waited to figure that out first :-).