Comment 8 for bug 1796193

To elaborate more I seen the following in the console output of a job which upgrades from bionic to cosmic:

Setting up ubuntu-release-upgrader-core (1:18.10.11.6) ...

Configuration file '/etc/update-manager/release-upgrades'
 ==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
 ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
   What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:
    Y or I : install the package maintainer's version
    N or O : keep your currently-installed version
      D : show the differences between the versions
      Z : start a shell to examine the situation
 The default action is to keep your current version.
*** release-upgrades (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ? dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
auto-upgrade [06:09:35]: ERROR: ERROR: Something went wrong with the upgrade.

release-upgrades has had Prompt changed from lts to normal so that we can test the upgrade to cosmic and then we get the bytes like object crash.