security.ubuntu.com only provides amd64 and i386 binaries

[Alex Murray]

security.ubuntu.com exists to provide priority access to security updates for Ubuntu. Currently, only the amd64 and i386 packages are provided - this leaves the other architectures at a disadvantage since they can only get security updates from the archive mirrors which have various time lags in how often they update.

security.ubuntu.com should therefore provide binaries for all of the supported Ubuntu architectures.

[Guruprasad (lgp171188)]

Hi Alex, it is not clear to me if Launchpad is involved in the publishing of security.ubuntu.com. Do you have any additional information, references, or context to help us figure this out? If yes, can you share it?

[Alex Murray (alexmurray)]

Guruprasad - I am not certain if Launchpad is involved in this publishing - in fact, I am not sure at all what is involved in the publishing to security.ubuntu.com - so I filed this against Launchpad as it was the closest thing I could think of. Perhaps @wgrant or @vorlon might know?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

This is definitely launchpad-driven. I am surprised to learn that only amd64 and i386 are published to security.ubuntu.com, I know of no reason for this to be the case: the archive/ports split is for mirroring, but the point of security. is to have an endpoint for security updates that doesn't depend on mirroring.

For architectures NOT on security.u.c, the correct behavior for installers etc. is to point to ports.ubuntu.com for the security pocket instead of to any mirrors, but we don't maintain a list of mirrors for ports that our installers will point you at anyway, so in practice I don't see that there's a user-affecting problem here?