To test the upgrade process, I've done basically the following: * Installed a potato system by using dselect (the "advanced method"), accepting the defaults (packages with priority >= standard).
* apt-get install debconf (replacing debconf-tiny). * Make /etc/apt/sources.list point to woody. * "dselect update". * "dselect select" and resolve a few dependencies and conflicts in the logical way. * "dselect install". This is the fun part: [...] 93% [Scanning packages]Template parse error near "" at /usr/lib/perl5/Debian/DebConf/Template.pm line 102, <TEMPLATES> chunk 2. E: Sub-process /usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt returned an error code (29) E: Failure running script /usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt Some errors occurred while unpacking. I'm going to configure the packages that were installed. This may result in duplicate errors or errors caused by missing dependencies. This is OK, only the errors above this message are important. Please fix them and run [I]nstall again Press enter to continue. installation script returned error exit status 100. Press <enter> to continue. I'm sure there are good workarounds for this (for example, using "apt-get dist-upgrade" instead) but I'm very worried about the fact that this may happen much more often than it should. Does somebody know what is the exact nature of this bug? Perhaps this is some kind of design flaw in dselect/apt/debconf/whatever that we can't fix retroactively? Have we reached the point where we will be telling our users not to use dselect to do upgrades in the release-notes for woody? Thanks.
