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Accepted
Patryk
Asked: 2013-10-18 10:29:52 +0800 CST

do-release-upgrade crashed on UnicodeDecodeError in decode() while updateing to 13.10 from 13.04

  • 772

I have just tried to upgrade to 13.10 from 13.04 and I have received the following error in console 

Checking for a new Ubuntu release
authenticate 'saucy.tar.gz' against 'saucy.tar.gz.gpg' 
extracting 'saucy.tar.gz'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/user/0/ubuntu-release-upgrader-xnzjbd/saucy", line 10, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/tmp/user/0/ubuntu-release-upgrader-xnzjbd/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 240, in main
    save_system_state(logdir)
  File "/tmp/user/0/ubuntu-release-upgrader-xnzjbd/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 133, in save_system_state
    scrub_sources=True)
  File "/tmp/user/0/ubuntu-release-upgrader-xnzjbd/DistUpgrade/apt_clone.py", line 149, in save_state
    self._write_state_sources_list(tar, scrub_sources)
  File "/tmp/user/0/ubuntu-release-upgrader-xnzjbd/DistUpgrade/apt_clone.py", line 241, in _write_state_sources_list
    "./etc/apt/sources.list.d/"+source)
  File "/tmp/user/0/ubuntu-release-upgrader-xnzjbd/DistUpgrade/apt_clone.py", line 246, in _add_file_to_tar_with_password_check
    for line in f.readlines():
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 296, in decode
    (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x9f in position 3: invalid start byte

This is in what I get in update-manager gui

do-release-upgrade crashed on UnicodeDecodeError in decode(): 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x9f in position 3 : invalid state
upgrade

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Check out sources.list.d for any dotfiles (files starting with a period) containing binary garbage (which the python unicode decoder blows chunks on). I had this same problem and when I removed the dotfiles out of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ it worked again.

    • 14

  2. Just for anyone with similar problems, the easiest solution is:

    export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
export LANG=C.UTF-8
do-release-upgrade

    Easy peasy. And this works for a lot of similar UTF-8 issues related to any kind of installs. Believe me!

    • 3

  3. I had a slightly different cause and solution, but the answer by user204109 helped out on this one.

    Basically, I had some non-conforming utf-8 characters in files under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ inserted by earlier dist upgrade scripts. This is, because my native language has some non ASCII characters, and apparently the localization was not quite correct earlier.

    Simplest way to find the culprits is to run:

    cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d
file *.list

    Then open in editor each of the files that is not listed as "ASCII text" and remove any characters that seem like garbage.

    • 2