Upgrading to Saucy crashes with a unicode error

I checked it with user and system-wide language set to English and the crash still occurs.

The crash still occurs after deleting all the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and restarting.
I guess that somehow, one of the automatic system tools inserted a translated Hebrew string somewhere and the current upgrader can't handle it.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I was with the same error, the only diference it that my locale it is portuguese. But I managed to fix by removing old files from /etc/apt (remains from upgrades from old versions).

Thank you, I finally made this workaround work too; I had to delete the hidden files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ too.
Still, I hope this problem grabs someone's attention.

This bug affects me too. French locale.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This bug was fixed in the package apt-clone - 0.3.1~ubuntu6

---------------
apt-clone (0.3.1~ubuntu6) saucy; urgency=low

  * Properly handle unicode when rewriting source files, thanks to Colin
    Watson for the patch. (LP: #1212025)
 -- Brian Murray <email address hidden> Fri, 06 Sep 2013 14:50:16 -0700

It still has to be backported to Raring, having it fixed in Saucy won't help those who are stuck in Raring because of this bug.

Release upgrades work by downloading a tarball of ubuntu-release-upgrader for the release that you are upgrading to and the code affected here (apt-clone) is included in that tarbarll, so it does not need to be fixed in Raring. apt-clone in the release upgrader has been updated so this should just work now.

This bug is not a duplicate of bug 1001335 which contains a traceback about a UnicodeDecodeError in check-new-release, whereas this traceback is about apt-clone.

At @Murray's suggestion, I closed 1241541 as a dup of this bug. I'm hoping this one will be reopened and addressed. I can't upgrade my Lenovo X1 carbon laptop raring -> saucy. Thanks.

Still not fixed.

➜ /home/mcarifio% sudo do-release-upgrade
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
Your Ubuntu release is not supported anymore.
For upgrade information, please visit:
http://www.ubuntu.com/releaseendoflife

Get:1 Upgrade tool signature [198 B]
Get:2 Upgrade tool [1,142 kB]
Fetched 1,142 kB in 0s (0 B/s)
authenticate 'saucy.tar.gz' against 'saucy.tar.gz.gpg'
extracting 'saucy.tar.gz'

Reading cache

A fatal error occurred

Please report this as a bug and include the files
/var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log and /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log in
your report. The upgrade has aborted.
Your original sources.list was saved in
/etc/apt/sources.list.distUpgrade.

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-02kpob/saucy", line 10, in
<module>
sys.exit(main())

File
"/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-02kpob/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py",
line 240, in main
save_system_state(logdir)

File
"/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-02kpob/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py",
line 133, in save_system_state
scrub_sources=True)

File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-02kpob/DistUpgrade/apt_clone.py",
line 149, in save_state
self._write_state_sources_list(tar, scrub_sources)

File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-02kpob/DistUpgrade/apt_clone.py",
line 241, in _write_state_sources_list
"./etc/apt/sources.list.d/"+source)

File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-02kpob/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 0x8b in position
1: invalid start byte

sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list.d{,-aside}
sudo do-release-upgrade # avoids this error

ty

In my case this crash was caused by having vim undo files (.something.list.~un) in /etc/apt/sources.list.d, which are binary. Looks like far too many files are being read in process

hawkerb - vim undo files are bug 1254447.

Comment #14 is being addressed in bug 1309447.