Details pane against unavailable Pro updates is misleading

Bug #2043425 reported by Robie Basak
12
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
update-manager (Ubuntu)
Status tracked in Noble
Xenial
In Progress
High
Nathan Teodosio
Bionic
In Progress
High
Nathan Teodosio
Focal
In Progress
High
Nathan Teodosio
Jammy
In Progress
High
Nathan Teodosio
Noble
In Progress
High
Nathan Teodosio

Bug Description

If Pro is not enabled, then the details pane against a Pro update misleads the user into believing that there is no update available.

Example of someone being misled: https://inteltechniques.com/blog/2023/11/12/ubuntu-pro-shenanigans/

Expected results: either no details presented, or the actual details of the potential Pro update presented

Actual results: a message that implies that there is no update available for this package, Pro or not.

Related branches

Robie Basak (racb)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Indeed the UI there is confusing. When the system is not attached to Ubuntu Pro the updates are unknown to apt. We build the UI by getting a list of binaries from 'pro security-status' but we didn't include extra logic to adapt the 'details' section. The 'available' version comes from apt and in this case there is no update.

We could probably also get the version for the pro command to fix the 'available version' information but I'm unsure if we have a way to have access to the changelog to display actual content.

@Design, what would we recommend doing? Should we just fix the version even without changelog description? Hide the section? Add some text explaining how the Pro updates are different?

Revision history for this message
Renan Rodrigo (renanrodrigo) wrote :

Bringing the side conversation here:

- the Pro Client has https://canonical-ubuntu-pro-client.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/latest/references/api.html#u-pro-packages-updates-v1 , which shows the same updates in security status but versioned and machine consumable (security status --format json will be deprecated at some point in time, when we are sure the APIs are sufficient)

- There is not currently a way of getting the changelogs for the ESM versions, and if there is and I don't know about it, not when you are unattached. So the good way to go would be replacing the changelog entry with this explanation about how Pro works a little different. If you want to include technical details from our side in this explanation I'm glad to help.

Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu):
status: New → In Progress
assignee: nobody → Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)
importance: Undecided → High
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Jammy):
status: New → In Progress
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Focal):
status: New → In Progress
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Bionic):
status: New → In Progress
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Xenial):
status: New → In Progress
assignee: nobody → Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Bionic):
assignee: nobody → Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Focal):
assignee: nobody → Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Jammy):
assignee: nobody → Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)
importance: Undecided → High
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Focal):
importance: Undecided → High
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Bionic):
importance: Undecided → High
Changed in update-manager (Ubuntu Xenial):
importance: Undecided → High
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