commercial PPA's are not working after release-upgrade

[Antti Kaijanmäki]

I upgraded from oneiric to precise today. release-upgrade disabled all the 3rd party repositories during the update. After the update I noticed that the repositories for commercial software I bought through software-center on oneiric are disabled. Even worse after enabling the repositories again they do not work.

1) What should happen:

Commercial software repositories should be enabled automatically after the release-upgrade. Ordinary users who use software center and buy software are not aware of repositories and such technical details.

2) What actually happens:

The repositories are disabled in Software Sources with unclear description of

    "Added by software-center disabled on upgrade to precise"

After enabling the repositories by hand the repositories do not work!

Err https://private-ppa.launchpad.net precise/main amd64 Packages
  The requested URL returned error: 404
Err https://private-ppa.launchpad.net precise/main i386 Packages
  The requested URL returned error: 404
Err https://private-ppa.launchpad.net precise/main amd64 Packages
  The requested URL returned error: 404
Err https://private-ppa.launchpad.net precise/main i386 Packages
  The requested URL returned error: 404
Err https://private-ppa.launchpad.net precise/main amd64 Packages
  The requested URL returned error: 404
Err https://private-ppa.launchpad.net precise/main i386 Packages
  The requested URL returned error: 404

[Antti Kaijanmäki (kaijanmaki)]

I accessed the repository with my browser and I see that there is no dist for precise. That's probably because precise is not released and thus no commercial software is offered to it, yet. Anyway this does not invalidate the point that the repositories should be automatically enabled.

Also the fact that early upgraders don't have access to their commercial applications should be informed somehow.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Randy Linnell (ranman)]

I think this may be partially due to the stage of the development cycle we're in. (I believe commercial applications have normally been added to the "partner" repository upon reaching Beta to avoid potential rework due to possible ABI changes.)

I strongly agree with the concept of doing all we can to seemlessly ensure application continuity for users. I think the expected/desired behavior would be that any commercial applications the user had with a specific version of Ubuntu would still be available to them on the successor version of Ubuntu, once they'd upgraded the underlying operating system, without the need for the user to take further action. Ideally this would happen somewhat automatically and transparently without users having to re-enable sources for specific applications. (This obviously depends on the application being compatible with the successor version of Ubuntu, which may not always be the case, but in practice they usually seem to be.)

[Giannis (karzisss)]

Very severe problem. novice users will never handle such a problem. They will end up with an old google-chrome for example and their paid app (ex stormcloud) will never update again.

That problem prevents me from suggesting any distribution update and of course with such a small support period for non-LTS releases, i would not recommend anything else but an LTS release for non experimental use of course but for a ordinary desktop. My self returned all my devices to 12.04 LTS so i dont have to reinstall the extra software (to enable the deactivated ppa) every 6 months.

[Giannis (karzisss)]

Is there an progress here? 13.10 is coming...

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

The Precise Pangolin has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that release