Upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04: apt/aptitude debug information

Question

I have an issue mentioned here: during update from 10.04 to 12.04

The workaround:

apt-get -f install -o APT::Immediate-Configure=false python-minimal

seems to work, but there are two problems with it:

1. We're using apt-get dist-upgrade to deliver new versions of our product and it would be great to perform OS update the same way, without any struts like the one mentioned above.
2. I'm not comfortable with installing packages without a proper configuration, who knows what problems it might cause in future

The preferred way to update Ubuntu is using update manager but we're also using custom repository and for some reason they don't want to work together :) This is another question that requires more investigation but I like apt-get dist-upgrade more.

I would like to understand what is the problem with python-minimal package (we don't mind fixing it and deliver our own version of the package) I haven't been able to get any debug information neither from apt-get nor from aptitude, all they say is:

E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'python-minimal'.Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details. (2)

which is not enough to fix the problem.

I also tried Debug::pkgProblemResolver and Debug::pkgDPkgPM apt flags but haven't got any additional info. There is a --log-level parameter in aptitude but lucid's version does not seem to support it.

So, the question is: how can I get as much as possible debug info from apt/aptitude - dpkg error code, control script that causes the problem and so on?

Answer 1

Luckily for you, it is an old problem, widely discussed. There is a solution for that here. Basically it consists of:

 dpkg --remove --force-all python 

 dpkg --remove --force-all python2.6-minimal 

Now download the newest Debian Packages (please make sure that the package versions you install are the newest available to you, these versions were ok at some point in the past when I had to do it) and run:

 dpkg --install --force-all python_2.7.1-0ubuntu5_all.deb 

 dpkg --install --force-all python-minimal_2.7.1-0ubuntu5_all.deb 

 apt-get clean 

 apt-get autoclean 

 apt-get update 

 apt-get install -f 

You can easily script this and do the release upgrade from within a script.