flash end of life soon, suggest remove from hirsute and also handle stable releases

[Seth Arnold]

Hello, Adobe has said they will not be supporting Flash beyond 2020:

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/flash-format-support-in-pdf.html
https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/

I think we shouldn't ship Flash in hirsute. Does our agreement with Adobe for distributing Flash installers or code allow us to skip shipping Flash in hirsute?

Thanks

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Why would we stop providing those packages before Adobe's EOL date? Please note that the packages exist and are (usually) updated on all stable releases. How would it make sense to not ship them with groovy?

I would suggest that they are shipped with groovy as usual, and that the packages are replaced with dummies in all stable releases once EOL has been reached.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

flashplugin-nonfree, at least, has been removed from Debian, and we have now followed this removal for groovy.

Removing packages:
 flashplugin-nonfree 32.0.0.414ubuntu1 in groovy
  flashplugin-installer 32.0.0.414ubuntu1 in groovy amd64
Comment: (From Debian) RoQA, unmainained, several RC bugs, techology deprecated; Debian bug #969112

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2020-10-09 16:15, Steve Langasek wrote:
> flashplugin-nonfree, at least, has been removed from Debian, and we
> have now followed this removal for groovy.

It's not the same package. The Ubuntu variant, unlike Debian's, builds flashplugin-installer which depends on adobe-flashplugin.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj) we no longer ship any web-browsers that can actually use this plugin. It is innert.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2020-11-10 18:10, Dimitri John Ledkov wrote:
> we no longer ship any web-browsers that can actually use this plugin.
> It is innert.

Not true. I just upgraded to FF 82.0.3 and confirmed that Flash keeps working as usual. adobe-flashplugin was updated a couple of hours ago, btw:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/1:20201110.1-0ubuntu0.20.10.1

There are (have always been) a lot of misconceptions floating around with respect to Flash, and flashplugin-installer and browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash were certainly removed prematurely. The EOL date is 2020-12-31.

Anyway, this is as it is, and the remaining Flash packages should of course be dropped during the hirsute cycle. Replacing Flash packages in stable releases with dummies is something which also should be considered IMO.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I noticed <https://askubuntu.com/q/1304922>. It's not clear to me if the OP had run into difficulties due to packages in the Ubuntu archive, or because some Adobe repo was enabled among the apt sources. In case of the former, the idea with replacing the packages with dummies soon appears to be even more desirable than I first thought.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2021-01-05 09:13, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
> In case of the former, the idea with replacing the packages with
> dummies soon appears to be even more desirable than I first thought.

Chris Coulson has just done that for adobe-flashplugin. So now we provide dummies in hirsute, all the supported releases, and also trusty and precise.

Also flashplugin-installer is now a dummie in focal, bionic and xenial.

Please consider to do the same for at least pepperflashplugin-nonfree instead of just dropping it from hirsute.

[jeremyszu (os369510)]

Hi,

I aware the adobe is not longer support since this year.
but the postinst[1] is still trying to get something from remote server.

as
```
upstream=$(HOME=/root wget -q -O- "https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/webservices/json/?platform_type=Linux&platform_arch=$arch&browser_dist=Chrome"...)
```

and it will take 4 hours to wait for the response.

---
16:17:01 Setting up pepperflashplugin-nonfree (1.8.3+nmu1ubuntu1) ...
20:11:51 ERROR: failed to determine upstream version
20:11:51 More information might be available at:
20:11:51 http://wiki.debian.org/PepperFlashPlayer
---

As comment#7, please consider to backport to bionic as well.

[1]
```
update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --install --fast || true
```

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Long Vuong Ha The (longvuong)]

Hi,
I encountered a problem today related to pepperflashplugin-nonfree.
Once I have tried to install pepperflashplugin-nonfree, it blocks all installation until you remove that package.
https://askubuntu.com/q/1306202/1035997

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

I'm not sure why this has been assigned to me - adobe-flashplugin has never existed in hirsute

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

A transition of pepperflashplugin-nonfree to a dummy package will happen via bug #1911463. Debian will keep the dummy in Bullseye, and drop it from the archive only in bookworm. Probably it's preferable also for us to wait with removing it until after the 21.04 release.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Dummies of pepperflashplugin-nonfree are now in place in the stable releases.

As regards hirsute it's no longer urgent, since there is a dummy there too. Probably it's easiest to just wait until Debian drops it from unstable.

[jeremyszu (os369510)]

Verified by using 1.8.8~ubuntu18.04.1.
The 4 hours hang issue is gone.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Per comment #13, the security issue is resolved and we can wait for this to drop out via Debian.