Stop appending 3rd party PPA names with warnings

[Lee Hyde]

Greetings Developers,

This isn't exactly a bug report in as much as it is a request to cease utterly unneccissary and counter productive proceedures during a in-place upgrade. Specifically the practice of appending the words 'disabled on upgrade to…' to any third-party PPA disabled during the upgrade.

I realise of course that there is a geniune need to disable all third-party PPAs, but the process of re-enabeling them is arduous enough with the tools provided (namely software-properties-gtk) without having to also remove these ammendments. For reasons that I won't go into, I keep a stable of nearly 100 PPAs (although that includes source PPAs) and software-properties-gtk is woefully ill designed for managing large numbers of PPAs (e.g. enabeling via the tick box takes a good 4-5 seconds, thereafter the display resets to the top of the list, one cannot both enable a PPA and edit it's name in the same action, etc…).

If you really must add a warning message, could you not patch software-properties-gtk to display a warning pop-up the first time software-properties-gtk is opened post upgrade? Although personally, the pop-up which appears during the in-place upgrade process warning users about the fact that these third-party PPA's are to be disabled is warning enough for me.

Regards,

Lee.

P.S. I realise that there is likely a way to automate the process of enabeling disabled PPA's and scrubing your 'disabled on upgrade to…' ammendments. Alas, every script and software package I've tried thus far has failed to do either. I'll no doubt investigate writing a working script from scratch, but I really don't see why I should be in the situation where I *need* to in the first place. The type of Ubuntu user confident enough to use third-party PPAs isn't the kind of Ubuntu user that *needs* or *wants* hand holding to this extent.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The ammendments "# disabled on upgrade to trusty" is a comment and subsequently has not effect on the entry. Why do you think that comment should be removed?

[Lee Hyde (anubeon)]

Because the comment is only valid for the short period between when I perform an in-place upgrade and when I deign to re-enable said PPA's, which I typically do almost immediately. I'm generally no interested in keeping invalid comments in my sources, so I choose to remove the ammendments when I re-enable the PPAs. Which, as I've said is time consuming using software-properties-gtk (incidentally, why *do* comments show up in the PPA name field in software-properties-gtk?).

In any case, I could equally ask developers why they think it desirable or neccissary to add such comments to my sources. You've already made provisions to warn the end user *during* the in-place upgrade that their third-party PPA's will be disabled. Do you think the end user a fool?

Regards,

Lee.

P.S. A related question: were I to have an unbroken chain of in-place upgrade from when I started using Ubuntu (which was Karmic), would my sources be littered with multiple 'disabled on upgrade to…' or just the one (i.e. do these comments of yours compound?).

[Peter Cordes (peter-cordes)]

Yes, the comments compound, if I recall correctly.

IDK why you don't just edit the text files (/etc/apt/sources.list, and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list) with an editor, esp. if the GUI sucks.

 It's pretty common practice for tools that mess with your config files to leave extra comments showing what they did.

 They're only useless if you're re-enabling stuff right away after an upgrade, when you still remember what happened. If you had forgotten that you had something from a PPA, and think of it months after an upgrade, it might be a useful reminder to see that you used to have a PPA enabled, but now you don't.

[Jason Heeris (detly)]

> The ammendments "# disabled on upgrade to trusty" is a comment and subsequently has not effect on the entry.

Nope, it makes the name of every PPA in the software properties dialog the same: 'disabled on upgrade to bionic'. Extremely annoying and difficult to manage.