Upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 do-release-upgrade fails

Question

When I try to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 (from 15.10) with the command:

sudo do-release-upgrade

I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/xenial", line 8, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 242, in main
    if app.run():
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1876, in run
    return self.fullUpgrade()
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1757, in fullUpgrade
    if not self.doPostInitialUpdate():
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 943, in doPostInitialUpdate
    self.tasks = self.cache.installedTasks
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeCache.py", line 787, in installedTasks
    for line in pkg._pcache._records.record.split("\n"):
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf6 in position 441: invalid start byte
=== Command terminated with exit status 1 (Fri Apr 22 09:09:59 2016) ===

Any ideas?

Answer 1

had a similar problem (same error but different character). fix was to edit /var/lib/dpkg/status and remove the offending character. In my case it was the davmail package.

Also found its been around for a while and caused other issues: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/foundations-bugs/2012-November/125607.html

"Maintainer: Mickaël Guessant" That (ë) isn't encoded in UTF-8 :(

You may have a similar issue. If you know some Python you can write a script to detect where the problem is in your case.

Answer 2

This is a confirmed bug that doesn't affect enough people to warrant fixing so far. If you are effected subscribe to this bug report and leave a comment:

• do-release-upgrade crashes with message : "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xae in position 337: invalid start byte" Edit

In my experience the more people effected by a bug the more chances it will get fixed.