Previous custom ubuntu-wallpaper disappears after an Ubuntu upgrade

[ridem]

The Ubuntu wallpapers initiative (from Flickr) is a good thing, but the big problem for lambda users is that the wallpaper they chose disappears after an upgrade of ubuntu, because every 6 months, the selected wallpapers are changed.
My mother would be very disappointed to see her beautiful wallpaper disappear after an upgrade.

Is there any way to save the one that was defaulted during an upgrade ?
Or even add a link "Previous ubuntu wallpapers" in the Appearance window ?

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

Thanks a lot for reporting this bug, however I am marking this as invalid as it constitutes a feature request which is outwith the definition of a papercut. For more information on what does constitute a papercut, please see here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut

I would recommend suggesting this at http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com as a feature for inclusion in future releases of Ubuntu.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

If a user has manually configured custom wallpaper, that setting should probably be preserved across upgrades just as any of their other work, details or data should be preserved.

Non-default (custom) wallpaper selections should probably be hard-linked, or copied to cope with their removal; and this approach should not prevent normal (default) wallpaper being replaced on upgrade.

[Vish (vish)]

We already make sure and have policies that , User data/settings should not be changed by any update. Looks like no one considered this issue.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

We could go back to renaming the binaries after release names (ubuntu-wallpapers-natty), so that the previous package stays installed after upgrades. Then the chosen wallpaper would never disappear.

[Vish (vish)]

Usually KenVandine uploads the wallpapers each cycle, so assigning the bug to him; as a reminder to upload as ubuntu-wallpapers-$RELEASE

And we need an update manager task too:

<didrocks> update-manager will propose to remove it at the end of the upgrade, maybe we can special-case this?
<pitti> should be easy to do
<mvo> sure, trivial to add cleanup for this
<mvo> or avoid it

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This was discussed some more in #ubuntu-desktop, and we agree that it'd be better to backport the gnome-control-center 3 patch which copies wallpapers to $HOME if they are in the system dir. That avoids piling up a lot of wallpaper packages over upgrades.

[Vish (vish)]

I dont think Ken VanDine would be spending time on backporting g-c-c.

This should be fixed when we get gnome3.
Or earlier in Natty itself if someone spends time on backporting it.

[D J Gardner (djgardner)]

This caught me on upgrading from oneiric to precise, so it is still a problem.
I would suggest that the remove script (or a separate tool?) searches known methods for setting the wall paper (unity-2d, unity-3d, gnome2, gnome3, xfce, etc) for all users and deletes what is left. Otherwise every wallpaper-setting tool would need to be modified.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I made a patch for gnome-desktop:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-desktop/commit/?id=6deb007f102d8ae9eabb10808f34d7129932dad3

The new version will fallback to load the default wallpaper if the user one is not available, not a fix for the original issue but it's better than having rendering issue and an empty background

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-desktop3 - 3.5.4-0ubuntu2

---------------
gnome-desktop3 (3.5.4-0ubuntu2) quantal; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/git_background_fallback.patch:
    - if the configured wallpaper is not available fallback to try the
      default one, it's not a perfect solution for having the wallpaper in
      use replaced but better than having no background (lp: #625357)
 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:19:13 +0200

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/625357