Wednesday, 11 March 2015

Ease of enabling -proposed

Reviewing crash reports in the Ubuntu Error Tracker and bug reports in
Launchpad, I've noticed quite a few tagged "package-from-proposed". This
tag is added by apport when the installed package version is available
from -proposed and not from -security or -updates. I'm even seeing these
from users of Vivid.

Evan suggested removing the "Pre-released updates ($release-proposed)"
checkbox from software-properties-gtk, thereby preventing accidental
enabling of it.

I think this should definitely be done for the development release of
Ubuntu. I also think it would be a good idea for Stable Releases given
that there is no indication in software-properties what any of the
pockets are for and given that packages in -proposed are not regularly
cleaned up so may contain packages which have either failed verification
or not had the bug fix verified.

One argument I might have made for leaving the checkbox would be to make
it easier for people to participate in the SRU verification process, but
I don't having people unintentionally enable it is worth that.

Are there any objections to removing the "Pre-released updates" checkbox
from software-properties?

Thanks!
--
Brian Murray