I was following the instructions on
https://www.devuan.org/os/documentation/dev1fanboy/en/upgrade-to-beowulf
and got to the point of doing apt-get dist-upgrade.

Partway through, it decided, a usual, that it had to stop and restart 
several services:
    postgresql lprng exim4 cron atd_______________________________
(the entry box had a lot of underscores in it; I suspect just filler?)

I OK'd it.

Next thing on the screen was:

Restarting services possibly affected by the upgrade"
postgresql: restarting...FAILED! (1)
lprng: restarting...done.
exim: restarting...done.
cron: restarting...done.
atd...done.

and then it froze for five hours.

After waiting five hours, I tried aborting the upgrade (it had evidently
failed by this point), first with control-C which did not work, then
with killall apt-get from a separate xterm.
Yes, this killed the upgrade.

I tried again with apt-get dist-upgrade
This time it just told me
    E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - (11: resource temporarily unavailable)
    E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg), os another process using it?

I'm not sure how to proceed from here.
Is it safe to somehow break the lock? If so, how?
Does something have to be done to restore the adnimistration directory
to a safe state?
Is it OK to reboot (this would be in the middle of an upgrade, and the
system might not be consistent enough to run successfully)

In case all else fails and I have to reinstall from scratch, I'd prefer
to install chimaera directly instead of going the ascii -> beowulf ->
chimaera route. Are there (draft) intructions for that?

-- hendrik