ubuntu-release-upgrader should offer to actually purge PPA's

[Erick Brunzell]

We currently only disable PPA's prior to beginning a release upgrade and I wonder if it would be possible to actually purge the PPA's or at least list the PPA's and recommend (or demand) that the user purge all PPA's prior to performing the upgrade?

I think it would be preferable to refuse to proceed with the upgrade than to have it fail once the process has begun, eh? I learned with a little help that the following command lists all PPA's in use:

for PPA_FILE in $(ls /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list); do egrep -v '^#|^ *$' ${PPA_FILE} | grep "ppa.launchpad.net" | cut -d "/" -f4-5; done

Then it's fairly easy to use ppa-purge to return the OS to a fairly out-of-box state package-wise. I don't know however what would happen with previously used PPA's that may have been disabled even though packages installed and/or upgraded via that PPA are still in use on the system.

Maybe just a harsh warning would suffice if made prominent enough? I know we like to limit pop-ups but sometimes they're just needed.

This should be considered a "wish list" bug, but I've thought about this for a while and bug #1600495 convinced me it was worth the electronic ink to mention it.

[zika (trti-ivko)]

Support for stop/pause and instruction to user how to purge given a list of PPA's to be offered...

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

ppa-purge is in universe so this would need a MIR if it's decided to use this feature.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MainInclusionProcess

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

Just thinking out loud here, but I think Zika may have the most sensible and certainly simplest solution. We already warn that we're disabling PPA's so maybe we could warn in a very prominent manner (bold font) that the user would be wise to actually purge PPA's. I need to perform a few upgrades in the very near future so I'll catch a screenshot of what we currently say.

One of the greatest quandary's to me is how we'd handle PPA's that had previously been disabled w/o downgrading or removing packages installed by that PPA???? I think there would still be a .save in /etc/apt/sources.list,d representing such PPA's??????