Public bug reported:
Some of us had a discussion on what happens to systems running former
Ubuntu flavours (which no longer exist) when they are upgraded. It was
understood that the upgrade path will lead to (vanilla) Ubuntu. However,
packages which used to be installed from the previous flavour, but which
are no longer present in this targetted Ubuntu release, will remain
installed.
This could introduce some issues:
* Since these packages themselves have no upgrade path, they will be subject to
vulnerabilities which do not get fixed, and become a security threat (could
even be services listening on the network)
* These packages may interfere with the APT dependency resolver
Example:
A system running Mythbuntu 16.04 is to be upgraded. There is no Mythbuntu
18.04, nor are there any other Mythbuntu releases to which there is an upgrade
path. The user would likely be presented the LTS upgrade path to Ubuntu 18.04.
Some of the packages which existed in Mythbuntu 16.04 but do not exist in
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, will likely remain installed, have no upgrade path, may
involve software started automatically or listening on the network, and put the
system at risk.
I think this is a problem the release upgrader needs to solve (I do not
see how it could be solved anywhere else). Either by recommending to
purge these packages (which obviously requires detecting them
beforehand, as ubuntu-support-status is able to do) and prompting about
it, or by just doing it.
** Affects: ubuntu-release-upgrader (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
--
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1826044
Title:
Packages unavailable in target release should be removed
To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/1826044/+subscriptions
--
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
