Upgrading to Debian sarge

[Brian May <bam@debian.org>]

Hello,

I am attempting to upgrade a powerpc based system to sarge. It was
previously on testing, but hasn't been updated for months.

I left the download going overnight (over 600Meg downloads according
to aptitude), but it doesn't seem to like anything it downloads. No
errors, no warnings, but no packages upgraded either.

What is wrong?

root@debian:~# aptitude install libc6
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
[...]
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libc6 libc6-dev locales
3 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 591 not upgraded.
Need to get 7296kB/11.3MB of archives. After unpacking 12.3kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
Writing extended state information... Done
Get:1 http://mirror.pacific.net.au testing/main libc6-dev 2.3.2.ds1-22 [3064kB]
Get:2 http://mirror.pacific.net.au testing/main libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22 [4232kB]
Fetched 7296kB in 2m14s (54.3kB/s)
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done
root@debian:~# echo $?
0

If I run the same command again, I would get the same response.

Some sort of message and non-zero exit status would be really nice
here...

I have seen this behavior before for individual files, when one file
is corrupt, but surely the entire archive isn't corrupt?

Then again, maybe the entire archive *is* corrupt!

root@debian:~# apt-get install libc6
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libc6-dev locales
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libc6 libc6-dev locales
3 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 591 not upgraded.
Need to get 7296kB/11.3MB of archives.
After unpacking 12.3kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
Get:1 http://mirror.pacific.net.au testing/main libc6-dev 2.3.2.ds1-22 [3064kB]
Get:2 http://mirror.pacific.net.au testing/main libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22 [4232kB]
Fetched 7296kB in 2m14s (54.3kB/s)
Failed to fetch http://mirror.pacific.net.au/debian/pool/main/g/glibc/libc6-dev_2.3.2.ds1-22_powerpc.deb  MD5Sum mismatch
Failed to fetch http://mirror.pacific.net.au/debian/pool/main/g/glibc/libc6_2.3.2.ds1-22_powerpc.deb  MD5Sum mismatch
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

root@debian:~# apt-cache show libc6 | grep MD5sum
MD5sum: ab0895ee6d8d2cf3b6906eb5228e5c25

root@debian:~# md5sum /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.3.2.ds1-20_powerpc.deb
69301110f8865edd7f2f93d79ad6a715  /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.3.2.ds1-20_powerpc.deb

Then again, this package looks old, so maybe the entire mirror is old,
and no longer usable.

My point though that aptitude should tell you what went wrong.
-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>