Gnome-software-common

[Filomeno Robles]

Limitto suite:[buster][buster-updates][buster-backports][bullseye][bullseye-updates][bullseye-backports][bookworm][bookworm-updates][bookworm-backports][trixie][sid][experimental]Limit to a architecture: [alpha] [amd64] [arm] [arm64] [armel] [armhf] [avr32] [hppa] [hurd-i386] [i386] [ia64] [kfreebsd-amd64] [kfreebsd-i386] [m68k] [mips] [mips64el] [mipsel] [powerpc] [powerpcspe] [ppc64] [ppc64el] [riscv64] [s390] [s390x] [sh4] [sparc] [sparc64] [x32] You have searched for packages that names contain gnome-software-common in all suites, all sections, and all architectures.Found 1 matching packages.

I have had some problems with Software(gnome-software) and contacted the developers, who told me I'm using a very old version of the gnome-software, 3.20.5 and that these problems were solved in the newer versions - this is where the main problem start: 3.20.5 seem to be the only version available when I run apt-cache policy gnome-software from terminal.

Ubuntu 16.04 is called xenial. When we search the xenial archive for gnome-software, we find version 3.20.1. That was the last version that was available when xenial was released. Per Ubuntu's policy, only targeted fixes for critical bugs or security bugs are accepted as patches after release. This ensures stability for users who don't need the latest-and-greatest and prefer to just have things work the same as they did yesterday. No new versions are allowed in xenial after release.

Fortunately, there is a suite called xenial-updates. Sometimes package maintainers are happy to upload new versions of software which are still compatible with its dependencies in xenial. This allows users to bypass the stability promise and get new software for a released distribution. gnome-software is available in this suite as 3.20.5. I think this is where your version comes from.

One of the problems you'll run into is compatibility of dependencies. The smallest update you can do is to bionic which runs 3.28.1. Let's look at the problems we may encounter. If we compare the dependencies of gnome-software_3.20.5 against gnome-software_3.28.1 we see:

I took a look at the debian/control files for libfwupd2, libgnome-desktop, libpackagekit-glib2-18 and packagekit and these don't seen to Breaks: or Replaces: any of the xenial packages so it could be ok to install those packages from the bionic archive. However, you'd need to look at the dependencies of those packages in the same way that I did above to ensure things are safe.

When looking at gnome-software-common I couldn't see a reason why you couldn't update the package. It's from the same source package as gnome-software and so I think they are meant to be paired and it can be updated. Take a look at apt rdepends gnome-software-common first to ensure that it doesn't break anything else. I think the -common package is common to all architectures and that's the only reason why it's split from gnome-software which is compiled for each architecture.

I'm really not sure about libappstream-glib8, libglib2.0-0 or libgtk-3.0. I think they can be updated because the major version doesn't increment. Usually if libgtk 3.1 is incompatible with 3.0, the package name would change from libgtk-3-0 to libgtk-3-1 so they could be installed in parallel and co-exist. Since that hasn't been done, I suspect they can co-exist.

As you can see, the dependencies are the toughest part to this. I'm not sure if method 2 above will do this for you automatically, but if you use method 3 then this is how you'd do it. Once you're happy that it can be installed, you'll need to also update the dependencies, and their dependencies, and their dependencies, etc. It could go all the way down to the kernel. Therefore it's up to you to decide how far you want to go with this update.

You may want to refer to the following packages that are part of the same source:gnome-packagekit-session, gnome-software-common, gnome-software-dev, gnome-software-doc, gnome-software-plugin-deb, gnome-software-plugin-flatpak, gnome-software-plugin-fwupd, gnome-software-plugin-snap.You might like to refer to the gnome-software package page, to the Package Tracking System, or to the source package src:gnome-software's bug page.

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