[Bug 779382] Re: update-notifier not visible under unity

[Steve Langasek]

Had a good chat with seb128 about this on IRC, and now understand better
what's happening / why / what we can do about it.

The unity-2d behavior change is a deliberate bugfix to bring it in line
with the unity-3d behavior.  So there is no bug in unity-2d here; the
bug is that unity-2d was not *previously* respecting the unity
requirements wrt systray behavior.

And this is the exact same behavior that existed in natty when running
unity-3d with the "/apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false" setting
described in the lucid release notes.

So this is a regression in behavior between beta-1 and beta-2 only for
users who are using unity-2d rather than unity-3d.

It is still a very serious regression; users who have modified the
behavior of their desktop in a rather common way, and who were not using
unity-3d, will upon upgrade to current oneiric no longer receive
notifications of available updates - including security updates, and any
updates needed in order to fix the lack of updates.  It does not impact
unity-3d users only because natty already shipped with this behavior,
but it does impact all users who are using unity-2d in oneiric, or users
who were using the GNOME fallback in natty and may upgrade to oneiric
beta-2.  Those users who are not using the default unity desktop (in
either of natty or oneiric) are also far more likely, proportionally, to
have this setting turned on: if they've overridden one default in favor
of historic behavior, they're more likely to override another default as
well.  So I expect a large number of unity-2d users to be affected.

To be fair, the users affected are also much more likely to notice the
lack of updates and do something about it.  But that's far from certain;
users may have applied this setting on behalf of their less-tech-savvy
relatives, etc.

We certainly want to get update-notifier ported to use libappindicator,
which would make this problem go away.  (The update-notifier part of
this bug is effectively a duplicate of bug #497913).  However, that's
unlikely to be done in time for beta-2, and since this bug impacts the
very ability of users upgrading to beta-2 to receive further updates, I
think it's important that we have some fix/workaround in place for
beta-2.  I therefore propose that we add update-notifier to the unity-
common whitelist
(/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/com.canonical.Unity.gschema.xml) for
beta-2, and we can then evaluate after beta-2 whether it's feasible to
port update-notifier to libappindicator for this cycle.

We should also apply the same fix to natty.  It won't help all Unity 3d
users who are already affected by this issue on natty, but it will help
some and limit the damage from spreading any further than it already
has.

I'm therefore targeting this bug to natty and also targeting the beta-2
milestone.  Strictly speaking we don't need this to be fixed on the
beta-2 live CDs, since users of those CDs aren't going to have the non-
default update-notifier setting, but we should have something in place
at least in the archive for the benefit of upgraders before beta-2 is
out.

** Changed in: unity-2d (Ubuntu Oneiric)
       Status: New => Invalid

** Changed in: update-notifier (Ubuntu Oneiric)
   Importance: Critical => Medium

** Changed in: unity (Ubuntu Oneiric)
       Status: New => Triaged

** Changed in: unity (Ubuntu Oneiric)
    Milestone: None => ubuntu-11.10-beta-2

** Also affects: unity (Ubuntu Natty)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Also affects: unity-2d (Ubuntu Natty)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Also affects: update-notifier (Ubuntu Natty)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Changed in: unity (Ubuntu Natty)
       Status: New => Triaged

** Changed in: unity (Ubuntu Natty)
   Importance: Undecided => High

** Changed in: update-notifier (Ubuntu Natty)
       Status: New => Won't Fix

** Changed in: update-notifier (Ubuntu Oneiric)
     Assignee: Ubuntu Desktop (ubuntu-desktop) => Michael Vogt (mvo)

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to update-notifier in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/779382

Title:
  update-notifier not visible under unity

Status in “unity” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “unity-2d” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in “update-notifier” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “unity” source package in Natty:
  Triaged
Status in “unity-2d” source package in Natty:
  New
Status in “update-notifier” source package in Natty:
  Won't Fix
Status in “unity” source package in Oneiric:
  Triaged
Status in “unity-2d” source package in Oneiric:
  Invalid
Status in “update-notifier” source package in Oneiric:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: update-notifier

  Hi,

  although there is a running update-notifier process, I don't see any
  indication of available new packages or security updates when using
  the new unity desktop.

  regards

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
  Package: update-notifier 0.111ubuntu2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
  Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Sun May  8 10:41:21 2011
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=de_DE:en
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/tcsh
  SourcePackage: update-notifier
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-05-02 (5 days ago)

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/779382/+subscriptions