Proposed deprecation of the Canonical partner archive

[Steve Langasek]

Hi folks,

One of the things we do as part of opening the new Ubuntu development series
is to enable that series for the Canonical partner archive.[1]

The partner archive has been empty for all releases since groovy.  In focal,
the only package it contains is Adobe Flash - which will not be released in
Jammy.

The Snap Store has matured to the point that I believe it supersedes the
partner archive, and we should remove this no-longer-used archive from
Ubuntu systems going forward, pruning the cruft.

This will require changes in several places across Ubuntu (livecd-rootfs,
subiquity, ubiquity, curtin, cloud-init, python-apt) to remove references to
archive.c.c, and changes to ubuntu-release-upgrader to clean up apt sources
on upgrade between releases.  This is all doable within the space of a
release cycle.

I have already solicited input within Canonical regarding this plan and have
heard of no blockers.  While it is unlikely that anyone in the community is
going to have a problem with this deprecation if Canonical is not planning
on publishing anything to it :), we want to be transparent to at least let
know this change is coming.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                   https://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org

[1]
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NewReleaseCycleProcess#Previous_release_plus_1_day
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20220127/64585e85/attachment.sig>