I've come up with a temporary solution that meets at least my needs
(until someone actually fixes the packages).  I have generated a Feisty
LiveUSB disk that for the most part includes the packages from the final
version of Feisty, but I have specified that certain packages are to
remain at the Herd3 level, allowing persistence to still work.

Basically, I used a "Preferences" file (I have attached the one that I
used) in the manner I describe below.  This Preferences file prevents
the files that it lists from upgrading when I upgraded the Herd3 files
to the final version of Feisty.

I used this Preferences file to generate a new version of the following
files on my Live disk:

/casper/filesystem.squashfs
/casper/filesystem.manifest
/casper/filesystem.manifest-desktop
/md5sum.txt

I generated these new files, again, following essentially the approach
at this link:  http://www.atworkonline.it/~bibe/ubuntu/custom-livecd.htm

My comments below refer to the procedure outlined at that link.

I generated the ubuntu-fs.ext2 file, containing the ext2 filesystem, as
described.  I actually used a 4GB file instead of the 2GB file shown at
the link because I ran out of space, when upgrading, using the 2GB file.
(I believe that the larger file does not ultimately cause you to consume
additional space on your usb disk because of the effect of creating and
deleting the "zeroed" dummyfile).  I mounted this ext2 filesystem and
copied the "unsquashed" filesystem from the Herd3 iso into that
directory (i.e. unsquash into this directory the contents of the
/casper/filesystem.squashfs file from the Herd3 iso).

Either prior to or after chrooting into this file system, I copied the
attached Preferences file into the /etc/apt directory of the unsquashed
filesystem.  Again, this will "pin" the listed files at the Herd3
versions listed in the attached Preferences file.  See the Apt How-To
for a more detailed description of "pinning."  (I haven't tried to
upgrade from Edgy.  But if you are doing that, then I suspect you at
least need to change the file names and versions in the attached
Preferences file to the corresponding Edgy files).  In my /etc/apt
directory, I also updated the sources.list file to be sure it had the
repositories I wanted.  There is a Wiki guide (I believe it is called a
Feisty Startup Guide) that lists available repositories.

I mounted and chroot'ed into this filesystem, exactly as shown at the
link above.

I executed "apt-get update" to update the list of files available at the
repositories.  I then used aptitude to run both the upgrade and dist-
upgrade commands in that order.

aptitude upgrade
aptitude dist-upgrade.

I ran these commands again (I might have used apt-get, instead of
aptitude, the subsequent time(s), although it shouldn't matter) until I
got feedback that there were no additional files to be upgraded or
added.  Note, I did get feedback that the "libdevmapper1.02" package was
broken (this is one of the "pinned" packages).  But, I ignored that
because I selected that as one of the files to not be upgraded.  The
result still worked for me.  I don't know if others will experience the
following issue, but I also had to work through an issue of not being
able to upgrade certain packages associated with acpid.  There are links
related to that issue.  But, I worked out all apparent issues before re-
squashing the filesystem.

After finishing the updates and upgrades, I made some additional changes
(e.g. added ntfs-3g and bootchart) that I expect do not affect the
persistence issue; exited out of the chrooted environment, generated the
new filesystem.manifest file (I used this exact same file as the updated
filesystem.manifest-desktop file); resquashed the filesystem; generated
the new md5sum.txt file; copied the resulting files to my usb drive per
the instructions for generating a live usb, and rebooted.

The boot was pretty slow (I may need to try some of the approaches for
speeding up boot time), but it does boot fine and the basic persistence
works fine.  While I haven't tested the result extensively, visually it
looks (and at least initially seems to operate) like the final version
of Feisty.  I am attaching a copy of the filesystem.manifest in case
anyone wants to see the differences between the packages I used and
those used in the final version of Feisty.  I can also upload the re-
squashed filesystem(assuming that that is not inappropriate for some
reason), but I haven't done that because I expect people may want to
generate their own version of the custom squashed filesystem.

It seems possible that my result could be duplicated with less effort.
E.g. start with a LiveUSB drive that uses the Herd3 version of Feisty,
and simply copy the attached Preferences file into the /etc/apt
directory of the booted LiveUSB, and then upgrade that booted LiveUSB in
the same manner as you normally would.  But I expect that that approach
will take a lot more room on your casper-rw partition because the
upgraded files will go onto the casper-rw partition, instead of being
part of the CDRom image.  I haven't tried that approach, so don't know
if it will work.

I honestly do not know if all of the files that I have "pinned" need to
be pinned, although I think at least most of them probably do (e.g. I
don't know if upstart-logd needs to be pinned, for example).  But, for
my purposes, I don't really care.  It would be interesting to see if
Colin Watson's changes above, combined with pinning a subset of the
files I have pinned, though, can be made to work.  I am not going to
have time to do that, but it might help narrow down the cause of the
issue.


** Attachment added: "filesystem.manifest"
   http://librarian.launchpad.net/7678438/filesystem.manifest

-- 
feisty 20070210/herd5 persistent mode doesn't work
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/84591
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