package installation failure during partial upgrade reports crash against ubuntu-release-upgrader

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Wow, this is quite the mess.

VarLogDistupgradeMainLog.txt covers a distribution upgrade done on 2012-02-01, and I believe that is where the Traceback comes from:

2012-02-01 00:11:43,511 ERROR not handled exception:
SystemError: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Then in VarLogDistupgradeApttermlog.txt we have:

var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/preinst: 17: /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/preinst: Syntax error: "fi" unexpected (expecting "then")^M
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/isc-dhcp-client_4.2.4-7ubuntu10_amd64.deb (--unpack):^M
 subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 2^M
Errors were encountered while processing:^M
 /var/cache/apt/archives/isc-dhcp-client_4.2.4-7ubuntu10_amd64.deb^M

I would have expected that to start the apport_pkgfailure routine in DistUpgradeApport.py, but it does not seem to have.

Looking on one of my systems I see the following in /var/log/dist-upgrade/.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 47K Mar 18 08:53 apt.log
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 902K Mar 18 08:53 apt-term.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 181K Mar 18 08:53 history.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1K Feb 7 13:41 lspci.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 79K Feb 7 17:00 main.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15M Jan 31 09:04 screenlog.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 7 13:41 term.log

It looks like main.log is leftover from a dist-upgrade and apt-term.log is from a partial dist upgrade on the March 18th. The first part of fixing this will be ensuring that partial upgrades properly clean up log files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/.

As far as I can tell this is because do-partial-upgrade calls doPartialUpgrade() from DistUpgradeController.py which doesn't use any of DistUpgradeMain.py - particularly setup_logging.

I've linked a branch to this bug report that worked for me although /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log ended up being empty. I'd prefer someone else have a look at it though.

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-release-upgrader - 1:14.10.2

---------------
ubuntu-release-upgrader (1:14.10.2) utopic; urgency=low

  * debian/test/control:
    - add missing pep8 test dependency
  * tests/test_xorg_fix_intrepid.py:
    -
 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Sat, 03 May 2014 08:37:51 +0200