[Bug 1745754] Re: upgrading from an End of Life release is not easy peasy

[Scott Carle]

It seems to be a very simple issue. do upgrade already tells you what
version you have and if there is an upgrade path on new releases. Why
can't it do that for every release going back into antiquity. There are
probably only 40ish official releases that would need to be covered.
When a release is archived you only need to update the sources for that
release to point the updater to the archives as opposed to the latest
supported releases. I'm a advanced user not a programmer but if I can
address it on the command line with this line of code to make it work on
a case by case basis

sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
and then
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

how hard would it be to create this in the normal upgrade process for
each of the old releases.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1745754

Title:
  upgrading from an End of Life release is not easy peasy

Status in ubuntu-release-upgrader package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  There is no good path for non technical users to upgrade end of life
  versions of Ubuntu.

  Explanation and suggestion below.

  I am a 25 year user of linux and at least a decade on ubuntu. I also
  am an it professional so have little problem diving below the
  interface to fix stuff or do non standard configuration. However I
  prefer stuff to just work and not have to go below the hood so to say.
  More importantly is all those people that simply don't have the
  ability to go below the hood.  I was running Zesty which was released
  just over a year ago and suddenly was unable to update or do a dist
  upgrade. I understand it was not a LTS release and am ok with updates
  not happening, but I was running it because 17.10 broke some of my
  software I use. However there is no upgrade path on a zesty computer
  at this time without manually changing your apt sources files. To me
  this is unacceptable.

  My suggestion is to even if you disable updates or even installation
  of other software from the repositories for the outdated distro that
  you leave the ability to do a dist upgrade. It could  be as simple as
  a option to dist upgrade that runs a scrip like I just ran to change
  to the archived version of the zesty repository and then rant the dist
  upgrade. I can also think of several other ways.

  what I did was use 
  sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list 
  and then 
  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

  For a technical user this is a relatively easy fix to the problem. For
  a non technical user that is a multi year educational journey to learn
  how to do this, they don't want this knowledge they just want their
  computer to work. I know that it should be a fairly easy fix for the
  people that maintain the gui upgrade.

  My wife or mom or many other people I have using Ubuntu desktops
  wouldn't know how to do this. It is a major failure point as a desktop
  to have a version just over a year old that someone can't click a
  button to update to the next version. I would propose that it
  shouldn't matter how old it is that there should always be left a
  standard upgrade path to the next version even if you are no longer
  supporting it. This type of major disconnect in usability is what
  pushes normal computer users to just go back to windows or mac. Even I
  was really irritated that I had to figure out why updating and
  installing software quit working and then figure out how to fix it.

  My overall suggestion would be not to archive older distro's just put
  in a pop up when you update or install software that your distro is no
  longer supported and click here to update. It would seem to be a
  fairly simple solution.

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