Thursday, 8 September 2022

Re: Upgrade Notifications for Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio

On Thursday, September 8, 2022 3:39:30 AM PDT Neal Gompa wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 6:29 AM Harald Sitter <sitter@kde.org> wrote:

> > https://invent.kde.org/system/distro-release-notifier may help

> >

> > On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 3:09 AM Erich Eickmeyer <eeickmeyer@ubuntu.com> wrote:

> > > Hi all,

> > >

> > >

> > > In Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio, we rely on Discover and the Discover

> > > Notifier to run our GUI-based package updates. I don't care if you

> > > personally use apt periodically from the terminal, a case can be made

> > > that we expect our users to use Discover to do their updates.

> > >

> > >

> > > Unfortunately, Discover is very, very flawed. It uses packagekit as its

> > > backend and its upgrader is designed to do one thing: upgrade packages.

> > > By comparison, the Ubuntu Update Manager will give the user the option

> > > to remove unused packages, unused kernels. and even notify of new

> > > Ubuntu releases, which is something that Discover cannot do since it's

> > > built to be as distribution-agnostic as possible.

> Plasma Discover *can* support all these things. That is dependent on

> the PackageKit backend and whether your distribution ships AppStream

> metadata to identify your operating system and its upgrade path. This

> is something that is being worked on for Fedora KDE, so I'm aware of

> the possibility.

>


I'm not sure about that. The way that Ubuntu does the notification is Update Manager monitors http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release-lts or http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release depending on whether or not /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades has been set to "Prompt=lts" or "Prompt=normal" respectively. This can be set via the frontend software-properties[-qt]. So, unless this can be converted to AppStream metadata, I'm not sure this is completely useful, nor am I sure the team would be willing to implement something there.


--

Erich Eickmeyer

Project Leader - Ubuntu Studio

Member - Ubuntu Community Council