Thursday 27 January 2022

Proposed deprecation of the Canonical partner archive

Hi folks,

One of the things we do as part of opening the new Ubuntu development series
is to enable that series for the Canonical partner archive.[1]

The partner archive has been empty for all releases since groovy. In focal,
the only package it contains is Adobe Flash - which will not be released in
Jammy.

The Snap Store has matured to the point that I believe it supersedes the
partner archive, and we should remove this no-longer-used archive from
Ubuntu systems going forward, pruning the cruft.

This will require changes in several places across Ubuntu (livecd-rootfs,
subiquity, ubiquity, curtin, cloud-init, python-apt) to remove references to
archive.c.c, and changes to ubuntu-release-upgrader to clean up apt sources
on upgrade between releases. This is all doable within the space of a
release cycle.

I have already solicited input within Canonical regarding this plan and have
heard of no blockers. While it is unlikely that anyone in the community is
going to have a problem with this deprecation if Canonical is not planning
on publishing anything to it :), we want to be transparent to at least let
know this change is coming.

Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org

[1]
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NewReleaseCycleProcess#Previous_release_plus_1_day