fails to upgrade with non-official repositories

[Brian May]

Binary package hint: update-manager

I have my /etc/apt/sources.list point to my approx mirror, so I don't have to download copies of every file for every computer I upgrade. update-manager considers all these entries as 3rd party sources and disables them all, and then complains it can't find ubuntu-minimal.

Sometimes it will ask me if I want to rewrite maverick to natty - this always use to happen prior to 11.04, but now it is very inconsistent. I can't see how to activate that part of the code. When it does ask me, everything works fine.

Brian May

[Brian May (brian-microcomaustralia)]

[...]
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Building data structures... Done

Updating repository information
WARNING: Failed to read mirror file

Third party sources disabled

Some third party entries in your sources.list were disabled. You can
re-enable them after the upgrade with the 'software-properties' tool
or your package manager.

To continue please press [ENTER]

Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com natty Release.gpg
Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty/main Translation-en
Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com natty Release
Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com natty/main amd64 Packages
Fetched 0B in 0s (0B/s)

Checking package manager
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Building data structures... Done

Invalid package information

After your package information was updated the essential package
'ubuntu-minimal' can not be found anymore.
This indicates a serious error, please report this bug against the
'update-manager' package and include the files in
/var/log/dist-upgrade/ in the bug report.

Restoring original system state

Aborting
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Building data structures... Done

[Brian May (brian-microcomaustralia)]

I worked out what happened. When upgrading my systems to 10.10, it automatically added the following line to my sources.list without me realizing:

deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick main #Third party developers repository

When doing an upgrade, it decided that there was at least one official source, so wasn't going to let me do the rewrite step.

The work around was to comment out this line.

Brian May

[RedSingularity (redsingularity)]

Closing report.

[Brian May (brian-microcomaustralia)]

Why was this closed as invalid? I found a work-around, but the bug still stands.

There is no reason why Ubuntu upgrades should break badly if you use non-official repositories.

[Nathaniel W. Turner (nturner)]

This worked with upgrades to the current LTS version (10.04). My organization has a fairly large number of Ubuntu workstations running the current LTS release, and we have a private mirror to speed up updates and installs (and reduce the burden on the public mirrors).

I did a trial upgrade from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS today to see if there would be issues when it releases, and I ran into this regression. (All private mirror sources get disabled without any option to rewrite.)

I suspect (but have not confirmed) that the issue may be related to the automatic addition of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/prerequisites-sources.list, which probably confuses the code that checks to see if you have any valid official repositories enabled.

Perhaps the heuristic that is used to determine whether you have a private mirror could be improved slightly?

It would be really awesome if this were fixed before the 12.04 LTS release so that LTS -> LTS upgrades at large deployments with internal mirrors do not all get bitten by this regression.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This bug covers the same issue as bug 289952 so I am marking it as a duplicate.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

Addressing what I think is your original request, if not the bug you submitted here, why not use a caching proxy instead of a local mirror? you could add something like this to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02proxy:

Acquire::http { Proxy "http://apt.example.com:3142"; };

Something like apt-cacher-ng might do the trick for you.

[Brian May (brian-microcomaustralia)]

I use approx, which is a caching proxy, you configure it though by changing /etc/apt/sources.list. No idea how it compares with apt-cacher-ng, in the past apt-cacher had limitations that stopped me using it.

approx is provided by Ubuntu, hence it should be supported by Ubuntu too.

In fact Ubuntu shouldn't care what mirror you use, it should just work. Even if this means somehow overriding internal checks or something.

[Brian May (brian-microcomaustralia)]

I thought I already had said so, however I don't believe this is a duplicate of #289952 for the reasons given in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/289952/comments/12

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

I actually think this probably should be duped to bug 289952, but since that bug's been linked to so many other issues, it's probably better to just de-dupe this one and address it separately. I've gone ahead and done that now.