Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

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Just tried upgrading on WSL and I got an endless loop of

  sleep: cannot read realtime clock: Invalid argument

Ctrl+C and then I get

  $ sudo apt --fix-broken install
  ...
  Setting up libc6:amd64 (2.31-0ubuntu9) ...
  Checking for services that may need to be restarted...
  Checking init scripts...
  Nothing to restart.
  sleep: cannot read realtime clock: Invalid argument
  dpkg: error processing package libc6:amd64 (--configure):
   installed libc6:amd64 package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1

and I have no clue how to fix this. (Edit: Found a fix. [1]) For the life of me I don't get how people always say upgrades are so easy on Ubuntu. I practically never have a pain-free Ubuntu upgrade experience... never. And while this particular issue appears WSL-related, I'm not just talking about WSL. There's always some random things breaking in the middle.

Update: After fixing that and upgrading everything, now I get this nonsense:

  The following packages have been kept back:
    libpython3.8 libpython3.8-dev libpython3.8-minimal python3.8 python3.8-minimal

  $ sudo apt-get install --upgrade python3.8
  ...
  The following packages have unmet dependencies:
   python3.8 : Depends: python3.8-minimal (= 3.8.2-1+bionic1) but 3.8.2-1ubuntu1 is to be installed
               Depends: libpython3.8-stdlib (= 3.8.2-1+bionic1) but 3.8.2-1ubuntu1 is to be installed
  E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

  $ sudo apt-get install libpython3.8-stdlib
  ...
  The following packages have unmet dependencies:
   libpython3.8-stdlib : Depends: libffi6 (>= 3.0.4) but it is not installable
                         Depends: libreadline7 (>= 7.0~beta) but it is not installable

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4898#issuecomment-61...

20.04 (well, modern glibc) is not compatible with WSL 1 due to missing bridges for a realtime-clock system call!

Microsoft is working on a patch, but until then, you need WSL 2 or stay on the previous release.

That's more on WSL thank on Ubuntu though. It's up to WSL to support the syscalls correctly, not on Ubuntu to aim for whatever translation layer WSL1 supports.

For the life of me I don't get how people always say upgrades are so easy on Ubuntu.

They do? I just assume that I have to do a backup of my data, wipe the disk and install they new version.

Ubuntu updates never worked for me.

I don't understand how for some people it "never works", while for me it's literally never once failed, all the way from 6.10 up until now, my latest desktop install lasting through 12 updates, plus motherboard and GPU change (between Intel and AMD CPU, and Nvidia and AMD proprietary driver and then AMD open source driver no less) and four different desktop environments (Unity, Gnome, Mate, and finally KDE).

The closest it's ever come to failing was literally yesterday when I realized that my desktop was still on 19.04 and they had closed the old repositories so the GUI upgrade utility failed. The CLI upgrade didn't skip a beat, though.

Do you run mysql / MariaDB? That's the one that bites me, 100% of the time. There are other packages that often require "adjustments" but the db makes dist-upgrade a total fail for me.

Not fun with servers, unfortunately.

No, I don't. I use Linux strictly on the desktop.

I think it's one of the things Ubuntu dropped from the Debian experience. In-place upgrades are much less reliable. I also tend to wipe and reinstall on the desktop at least. Makes me keep configs in dotfiles/puppet and is good training for having to replace a computer. On the server side, upgrading between LTS releases seems to work better.

Ubuntu tests upgrades between LTS releases extensively and so do Ubuntu community developers and advanced users.

As you said, server users always upgrade. Enterprise desktop users upgrade. A lot of general users don't - they reinstall.

The upgrade process you should use with Ubuntu is different to Debian. In Debian you'd use apt, in Ubuntu you should use the update manager. Update manager specifically checks for upgradability, it has specific warnings and workarounds that are added for each release following testing and reports from end-users. This makes it much easier to upgrade.

The reason why users think the Ubuntu upgrade process is less reliable compared to Debian is they serve different user segments. Most Debian users are technically advanced, engage with the distribution and they often stay in their stream (e.g. testing). Ubuntu is used by lots of normal users - many may not pay particular attention to how packaging works - this means they often do things that make upgrades complex: install community PPA's that advance packages past the next LTS version, install Node into /usr by wiping out apts package knowledge, etc, etc. The range is just bigger.

For many normal users upgrading may no longer be the best option - it's just faster to reinstall. I personally do upgrades, I still find them magical and it's part of the fun: http://www.futurile.net/resources/ubuntu-upgrades/

Canonical wisdom is to have separate / and /home so you can wipe system easily.

I upgraded by grepping for the packages that were breaking resolution and removing them. But I already know the failure mode so that whole thing took a few minutes.

I do have separate mounts for that reason though.

Interesting, is this feasible in everyday life?

I do not use Linux on my desktop or notebook but I would like to do so in the near future. This means I should strive to keep all my user created data within the home directory at all times? How about program preferences and configs that get saved elsewhere by default?

I imagine having ZFS snapshots of / would be useful for updates going forward.

I've gone through 3 laptops now with a migrated home. That included ubuntu -> arch -> fedora migration too. It works pretty well. (with more issues between distros than between version upgrades)

> This means I should strive to keep all my user created data within the home directory at all times?

Why would the user have privileges to save it outside of the home directory? :) Special cases like databases with storage in /var need to be handled separately.

> How about program preferences and configs that get saved elsewhere by default?

Nothing goes (should go) elsewhere by default.

If you're wiping the distro and re-installing - you probably don't want to keep /etc anyway.

Fwiw Ubuntu in place lts to lts release upgrade should be solid. But sometimes you want start with new, contemporary defaults, or a different disk layout.

BTW with zfs, you can have a separate home (or home/your_user) filesystem, and not worry about allocating fixed space (thus running out of free space on /, but with more available in /home and vice-versa).

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