The system-image based phone does not display a channel in its version UI

[John McAleely]

Using ubuntu-touch/ubuntu-rtm/14.09-proposed #123 on a krillin

Open System Settings | About This Phone or System Settings | About This Phone | OS

There are various version numbers displayed.

Expected result:

 The channel name (ubuntu-touch/ubuntu-rtm/14.09-proposed) is visible

Actual result:

 No UI exposes the channel used by the device

This should be designed at the same time as bug 1466021 and bug 1334257.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

This information should come from the version scheme

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

Who's coming up with that?

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

This has been discussed in email, but I'm not sure it was concluded satisfactorily.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

I marked this as Invalid on the ubuntu-system-image bugtask because the information is already available via its D-Bus API. The mapping returned by .Information() includes a 'channel_name' filed which is exactly what you want. It just needs to be exposed in the u/i.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

From email thread some time back:

After some discussion with Steve and others, I am thinking we may be fine with things as they are for the ubuntu and device images. We avoid the idea of dot releases, the current "parts" are already version with the date they were created, and the baseline Ubuntu distro version is also available. i.e. we currently have

OS Ubuntu 14.10 (r169)

Build number 169
Ubuntu image part 20141121.1
Device image part 20141119-db417fa (suffix is the git hash which to me is a bit obtuse)
Customization image part 1416428357 (no idea what this represents)

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

I disagree. consider these two bug reports:

OS Ubuntu 14.10 (r8) "my phone does not ota"
OS Ubuntu 14.10 (r8) "my phone does not ota"

one is from the spanish channel, and the resolution is 'your channel contains no further images'. The other is from the english channel, and the bug is that images 9-14 have not been seen by the phone for some reason.

Or, consider if you prefer the data in the more details screen:

Build number 169
Ubuntu image part 20141121.1
Device image part 20141119-db417fa (suffix is the git hash which to me is a bit obtuse)
Customization image part 1416428357 (no idea what this represents)

Now, you can survey system-image.u.c to establish for which channels build 169 contains those bits, but unless you know which channel the handset is on, you cannot predict which update the handset will receive next.

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

(or know which stream of updates it has recieved in the past)

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

@john what would you propose? seems the missing info are the available device and custom image ids
what is the custom image id based on?

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

@pat - in the more details screen:

Ubuntu Update Channel: ubuntu-touch/stable/bq-aquaris.en

Where the latter part will always be a geeky english-like string.

Given that we can alias multiple named channels to the same underlying tarball set, I don't believe you can ever infer the channel name from the tarball IDs.

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

@mpt any chance of progressing this?

Now that

ubuntu-touch/rc/bq-aquaris.en has builds 18 & 19 in routine use and
ubuntu-touch/stable/bq-aquaris.en has builds 17 in use and 18 about to be created, this is getting very confusing with our customer.

[Jouni Helminen (jounihelminen)]

would be nice to show the channel name in system settings that you get with this in the terminal on the device:

"cat /etc/system-image/channel.ini"

On my device it says:

channel: ubuntu-touch/rc-proposed/meizu.en

Which is nice to know without having to open up the CLI

[Jouni Helminen (jounihelminen)]

as a use case, it's nice to be able to tell (from the UI) whether your device is flashed with proposed, or something else