Comment 6 for bug 196069

On reading what I've written, I apologize for being snippy. I do understand that this is a difficult issue, in large part because of the requirement to support upgrades from one release to another.

Addressing the first described issue requires some useful differentiation between "linux" and "linux-generic", which wouldn't make sense as they depend on precisely the same set of packages. Dropping either would probably break upgrades for some people. That said, it's still hard for a user to determine which is the correct package to install from a package manager.

Addressing the second described issue is made more difficult because of the nature of naming for source and binary packages. Because of the existence of the binary "linux" meta-package, sensibly stored in linux-meta, the package management software grabs the associated source for the selected binary package.

Both could be addressed by dropping the "linux" binary meta-package from the linux-meta source, although this would cause upgrade issues for users with "linux" installed, and not "linux-generic". It may be possible to work around this with a quirk in update-manager, although it is probably only safe to do so by introducing such a change early in the release cycle to ensure adequate testing.