Comment 32 for bug 301189

I'll respond to a couple points...

"If Azureus simply provided a .deb at their website and you added that manually to the package manger, would that also fail to update I wonder."

Yes, it would fail to update, for the same reason. The update failure is because Azureus/Vuze is installed in a location that users are not allowed to write to. (I am not aware of any .deb, from the Ubuntu repositories or not, that installs an application in a location or with permissions that a user would be allowed to modify it. But, maybe such a thing does exist.)

The ways that occur to me to fix this are...

 - As I've mentioned before, install Azureus/Vuze yourself in your home directory. Then automatic updates will work fine.
 - Azureus/Vuze is made to be more "Linux[/Ubuntu] aware" and prompts for credentials to run with elevated privileges so that it can update itself.
 - You go manually set permissions to be more relaxed, so that Azureus/Vuze can update itself without elevated privileges.

Those second two I think are bad ideas, again, if you're using the packaged version of an application, it shouldn't be updated by anything besides the package manager, so that the package manager is aware of the changes (and can possibly handle changed dependencies). Plus, I'm not even sure if they'd even work, the packaged version may be installed in a different manner than Vuze's updater expects. (I'm not aware of the fine details here.)

Side note - if the Azureus folks were to provide a .deb file, it wouldn't be a big leap from there to provide a Debian repository (and just update it as new versions of Azureus are released), which you could add to your list of repositories and solve this problem. However, I don't know of any plans of them to offer this, I don't see it happening in the near future, it's something you'd have to take up with them. :-)

This is not really just a problem with Vuze, but with any application with a built-in updater. If you used a packaged version, you are relying on the repository maintainers and package manager to keep you up to date. If you'd like to keep yourself up to date or let the application to it itself, you've got to install the application yourself...