Bug#599523: Ping - unexpected downgrades

[Julian Andres Klode]

(replying to Axel)

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 05:58:02PM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> On 28.10.2012 12:52, Axel Beckert wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Michael Biebl wrote:
> >> On 16.06.2012 18:50, Arne Wichmann wrote:
> >>> Is there any progress on this serious bug? It is now unhandled for more
> >>> than one year.
> >>
> >> update-manager is basically unmaintained atm.
> > 
> > So what about RFA'ing update-manager then at least?
> > 
> > Ignoring the epoch, Ubuntu has only lower versions than Squeeze in any
> > of their releases, even in raring (1:0.174.3 in quantal and raring vs
> > 0.200.5-1 in squeeze and 0.200.5-2 in wheezy). See [1] and [2].
> > 
> >   [1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=update-manager
> >   [2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/u/update-manager.html
> > 
> > So Ubuntu explicitly prefers an older version than Debian for years
> > now despite its a dependency of (at least) ubuntu-desktop. This looks
> > quite uncommon and suspicious.
> > 
> > (Or is that even a completely different package but with the same name
> > in Ubuntu and Debian?)

It was more or less common code, and it was then modularized and cleaned up
during GSoC to be directly useable in both distributions. The changes were
uploaded to Debian. Ubuntu, relying more heavily on update-manager, never
merged in those changes, and continued the old code base.


> > 
> > So maybe orphaning or even removal from testing is the better solution
> > than just RFA'ing the package.
> > 
> > It only seems to have one hard reverse dependency (and a few Suggests
> > and one second-level Recommends) in Testing currently, i.e. removing
> > it from testing and hence wheezy shouldn't be too complicated with
> > regards to reverse dependencies:
> > 
> >   update-notifier depends on update-manager-gnome
> > 
> > But OTOH 26% popcon installations and 10% votes rather oppose a
> > removal quite strongly.

It was part of the default installation together with other stuff
from Ubuntu, but we now use (GNOME) PackageKit instead.

> > 
> > I hence recommend to at least issue an RFA for update-manager.

We can
 (a) upload a compat package which switches the user to PackageKit
     and includes a script to call gnome-packagekit's update manager. 

 (b) upload a new update-notifier package that moves the user to
     GNOME PackageKit, and remove update-manager from the archive
     (or at least testing).

 (c) upload a new update-notifier package that simply removes the 
     dependency, and disables the actions.

I think that (a) or (b) are good options. For (b), we still need
to keep update-notifier-common as update-notifier-kde still uses
those parts.

-- 
Julian Andres Klode  - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member

See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.
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