Potato->woody upgrade fails

[Gary Woodman]

--- Sam Couter <sam at couter.dropbear.id.au> wrote:
> Gary Woodman <antigramp at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> > I'm assuming there is a problem with the control information on my
> > machine, some "undefined value" in the global database or some
> package
> > info. It's difficult to believe that I'm the only person suffering
> from
> > a gross bug in /usr/lib/perl5/Debian/DebConf/Question.pm.
> 
> potato -> woody (major version to the next) upgrades are fully
> supported and heavily tested in Debian.
> 
> If you can work out which bit is broken (and how), submit a bug
> report
> of severity "serious" in Debian's BTS: http://bugs.debian.org/

No chance of that!

> > It's no big deal to reinstall woody from scratch, but I expected
> more
> > from Debian. Does anyone have a clue what's happening here? Any
> > suggestions as to how I can proceed with the upgrade?
> 
> I'd start with re-installing just the suspect packages first. You
> could start with dpkg, debconf, apt and dselect:
> 
> apt-get install --reinstall dpkg debconf apt dselect
> 
> And then see if the install finishes.

This was a good suggestion, but unfortunately produced exactly the same
error I reported previously, demonstrating that the problem was not
with dselect or apt, but buried deep in the control information on my
system.  I've been using it since I installed potato the best part of
two years ago, and I didn't like my chances of back-tracking to attempt
to determine where it went bad; especially since it didn't *look* bad
until I tried to upgrade to woody...

So I made my backups, reinitialised / and /usr, and installed woody in
an hour, a fraction of the time I've spent scratching my head about
dselect, apt, and /usr/lib/perl5/Debian/DebConf/Question.pm. Everything
back to normal (even dselect). All's well that ends well.

Gary

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