Comment 79 for bug 107188

Many thanks for the help you guys.

I would also like to thank John and Christian Assig for their efforts so far.

FerranRius's comment is very prudent and correct however, this upgrade should not be attempted whatsoever by anyone who uses their machine for work, school, or other important operations. The patch I posted is simply the fix I came up with for my situation when I attempted to upgrade Feisty on the laptop I use around campus. I never thought I'd be thankful for dual-booting windows, and to be honest, I resent the need to rely on it. Luckily, I have two old towers I use as sandboxes for messing around with networking and various Unix installations. One is an Intel/nVidia, the other is AMD/ATI, both failed the upgrade and became unbootable (so I'm 0 for 3), making them perfect candidates for trying to fix this.

Currently there are two memory leaks occurring as far as I can tell, only one of which I have identified and addressed in the patch. The second appears to be coming from the fetching of backport archives, which occurs prior to the main upgrade. I am unable to replicate this leak on my machines, so I have relied on the work of Christian Assig to track this down. He deserves many thanks for bearing with my sophomoric efforts. Although this patch does not fix the second leak, Christian did report dist-upgrade faied gracefully instead of crashing by bringing up an error window and attempting to recover and reset the system.

I need to repeat that I am not an official developer. I am a user with just enough information to make me dangerous. Nonetheless, I greatly appreciate your efforts to assist me in solving this critical issue.