Ubuntu
chromium-browser package

Why is chromium-browser only kept up to date on bionic-updates and not focal-updates and jammy-updates?

Asked by James Mortensen

I build and maintain container images for Selenium testing on ARM64 and ARMHF platforms, and having access to the latest Chromium and Firefox ARM browsers and drivers has been really helpful. However, I've observed that Chromium is only kept up to date for ARM64 and ARMHF on bionic-updates only. Bionic is older than two newer LTS releases, Focal and Jammy, yet they aren't getting these updates.

Do we know why Chromium ARM is not up to date on the other "updates" repos like focal-updates and jammy-updates? I wanted to understand because Bionic is scheduled to move to ESM in April 2023, and I'm wondering if these Chromium ARM updates will continue.

Thank you,
James

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said (last edit ): 		#1

The "chromium" deb packages for Ubuntu focal and newer are dummy-packages that do not contain the software, but install the snap version. So there is no need to provide updates for these, because update management is happening in the snap store. Ubuntu's deb package always installs the newest stable version available in the snap store. This is independent of the architecture and there is no special handling of ARM systems.

The same for firefox, but only starting with jammy.

Remark: In firefox the snap transition has been made visible by giving the dummy deb package the version number "1:1snap...", see https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox
For chromium-browser the version is frozen at 1:85.0... which is misleading. Maybe it is worth creating a bug report against chromium-browser to request setting the version string in a similar way.

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