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distro-info package

Safety update for bionic - new package distro-info. What is it and why it is must be installed?

Asked by Piotr

Dear Community,

Like in the title. Today I noticed that new package will be installed on bionic if I will be do update. This is distro-info. What is it and why it is important for safety? I also found that this package is backported to bionic but why? I installed it and I can see that it only inform about supported relases of Ubuntu. Everyone who is interesting with own system knows what release are supported by Canonical so this not have sense in my opinion.

I have also question to installing updates for packages. How I can install update only for one package? For example I noticed that apt upgrade command want to update firefox, grub and leafpad. How I can update only firefox using apt or apt-get command? I will be very appreciate for answer.

Thank you for answer and your time!

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Ubuntu distro-info Edit question
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Manfred Hampl
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Best Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

Nothing "must be installed". It is up to you whether you activate automatic updates and/or manually perform package updates. If you do not run updates and also do not allow automatic updates to run, then you will get no updates at all. In my opinion this does not make sense, but it is up to you what you do with your system.

Where do you see a "safety" reason for installing that package?
(Do you confuse safety with security?)

Re: "I also found that this package is backported to bionic": Usually the reason for a backport is that the package from a later release works better than the original one, but does not justify a SRU. It is your decision whether you activate the bionic-backports repository or not. Ubuntu works well with and without.

As far as I know the package distro-info-data is used by the update-manager to tell that a new release is available.

There was some problem with certain packages that belong together, being scattered between bionic-updates, bionic-security and bionic-backports. Some details are available in the bug reports for distro-info. Why don't you look yourself?

And for the second question:

1. It is a rule for bug reports, that there should be separate bug reports for separate problems. You should follow that rule also in the question/answers area: Each question with one single topic.

2. Look in the man pages for apt and apt-get and you see that "sudo apt install packagename" will install the current version of a package, and if it is already installed do an upgrade.
The graphical program update-manager allows selectively (un)-selection packages to update. Why don't you use that one if you want to skip a certain package upgrade?
Why do you want to skip upgrades at all? Usually there is a good reason for publishing an upgrade for a program.

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Piotr (peterq94) said : 		#2

Thanks Manfred Hampl, that solved my question.

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Piotr (peterq94) said : 		#5

Mr Manfed Hampl, in previous post you wrote: "There was some problem with certain packages that belong together, being scattered between bionic-updates, bionic-security and bionic-backports. Some details are available in the bug reports for distro-info. Why don't you look yourself?"

I don't know about what bugs you mentioned but I tried find this and I can't do it. These bugs are for distro-info package or this update what I talked in this subject? Or you mentioned general bugs for bionic? My english is not the best so probably I don't understand you. I want to tell you that I always follow ubuntu packages website and launchpad and I can see bug reports.

Revision history for this message
Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#6

Short recipe for the current case:

You are referring to the package distro-info, so please look at the Launchpad page for distro-info for Ubuntu:

Either on this current question page, click on "overview" in the top left corner below the Ubuntu logo
or open https://launchpad.net/ubuntu and put "distro-info" into the search box, press enter and then click on "distro-info" in the results page.
You will end up on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/distro-info
There you see the status of the binary packages belonging to the source package "distro-info" and you can look at details by clicking on the triangles besides the different versions or by clicking on the a version number.

If you are interested on the history of a package, click on "View full publishing history" in the top right corner.
On the publishing history page you can open the details for a specific version by clicking on the triangle.

If you are interested in more details about what has been changes in a certain version, you can look at the change log by clicking on "View full change log" from the package page.

In the change log for distro-info version 0.14ubuntu0.2 in xenial-updates you see e.g.
  * No-change rebuild to fix instability in xenial-security (LP: #1925383)

The number besides "LP" is a bug number. just clock on it and you can see the bug report that I was referring to.
(Remark: I assume instead of "instability" it should read "uninstallability")

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Piotr (peterq94) said : 		#7

Thanks Manfred Hampl, that solved my question.