I have identified the error and written a patch to the dist-update scripts.
The error is very serious in nature and is likely causing many other bugs, crashes and corruptions. As indicated in the error logs, the "Distribution Upgrade Tool" exits due to an out of memory error when trying to spawn a thread. This low memory condition is caused by an infinite loop in the "doUpdate()" method in the DistUpgradeControler class. The infinite loop in turn, is a result of an incomplete "markUpgrade()" method in "/usr/lib/python2.5/site- packages/apt/package.py". The loop is incremented upon reception of an IOError Exception, however this exception is not thrown as expected. The loop is designed to terminate if no Exception is received, but an Exception of a type other than IOError is sometimes returned resulting in an endless loop. To fix these issues, the patch replaces the reference to the stub "markUpgrade()" method with "markInstall()". While not ideal, the result is the same. Additionally, I added some robustness to the maxRetries loops in DistUpgradeControler.py by converting them to 'for' loops. A fall-back 'except' was also added to the loops purely for the purposes of debugging. To use this patch, download the Gutsy dist-upgrade script package from http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader- all/0.81/gutsy.tar.gz, extract and apply the patch. The just navigate to the extracted directory and run "./dist-upgrade.py". ** Attachment added: "dist-upgrade patch" http://launchpadlibrarian.net/10123821/gusty-dist-upgrade.patch -- Distribution Upgrade fails to complete -- Cannot allocate memory https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/154493 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
