Upgrade to 13.10 crashes because of hidden file

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Fortunately (for reporting the bug), after upgrading to 13.10, trying to upgrade to 14.04 has the same problem:

/home/mool 30 % sudo update-manager -d
[sudo] password for mool:
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
authenticate 'trusty.tar.gz' against 'trusty.tar.gz.gpg'
extracting 'trusty.tar.gz'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-qwg0du/trusty", line 10, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-qwg0du/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 240, in main
    save_system_state(logdir)
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-qwg0du/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 133, in save_system_state
    scrub_sources=True)
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-qwg0du/DistUpgrade/apt_clone.py", line 149, in save_state
    self._write_state_sources_list(tar, scrub_sources)
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-qwg0du/DistUpgrade/apt_clone.py", line 241, in _write_state_sources_list
    "./etc/apt/sources.list.d/"+source)
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-qwg0du/DistUpgrade/apt_clone.py", line 246, in _add_file_to_tar_with_password_check
    for line in f.readlines():
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 296, in decode
    (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x9f in position 3: invalid start byte

apport information

apport information

apport information

With regards to point number 1:

1. First of all, if the updater crashes with a stack trace, a dialog should appear to report the error.
    Pointing to the log file, which I later found out to be /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log, would be helpful.
   I waited several minutes, thinking that it was busy in the background.

I would expect the upgrader to present you with a crash dialog and a bug reporting wizard to be launched. Do you have a crash file in /var/crash? It would be named after the binary so something like _usr_bin_update-manager.

How did you determine that it was the undo file causing the issue? I tried to recreate this with apt-clone (which is used by the release upgrader to save information about the system state) after having made a vim undo file in my /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ folder. Running apt-clone clone I was able to create a clone file and did not receive a crash with the undo file. Do any of your other sources files have unicode in them? Thanks in advance!

% sudo ls -la /etc/apt/sources.list.d
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 24 20:04 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Nov 25 21:09 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 176 Nov 24 20:04 google-chrome.list
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 207 Nov 24 20:03 google-chrome.list~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 176 Nov 24 13:59 google-chrome.list.distUpgrade
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 209 Nov 24 19:22 google-chrome.list.save
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1714 Nov 24 20:04 .google-chrome.list.un~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 24 19:22 xorg-edgers-ppa-saucy.list
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 24 19:22 xorg-edgers-ppa-saucy.list.save

In this situation I get the mentioned stack trace.

% sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/.google-chrome.list.un~

Now the stack trace does not happen.
QED.

The undo file was created by reverting the change caused by upgrading, the Google source line was commented out, using Vim with 'undofile' enabled.

[Expired for ubuntu-release-upgrader (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

This bug was fixed in the package apt-clone - 0.3.1~ubuntu8

---------------
apt-clone (0.3.1~ubuntu8) trusty; urgency=medium

  * Fix path for setting permissions of restored /etc/apt/sources.list
 -- Brian Murray <email address hidden> Mon, 10 Feb 2014 10:36:19 -0800

The new version of apt-clone is now included with the release upgrader tarball for trusty.