Ubuntu Pro

Users are posting about updating Ubuntu and seeing a message like:

The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with 'esm-apps' enabled:
  libgraphicsmagick-q16-3 liburiparser1 libmagickcore-6.q16-6-extra
  imagemagick libgegl-0.4-0 lynx-common libzmq5 python2.7-minimal libhdf5-103
  libmagickwand-6.q16-6 fish-common libgegl-common libldns2 python2.7
  python3-rsa lynx imagemagick-6.q16 libopenexr24 libsdl2-2.0-0 libmysofa1
  libmagickcore-6.q16-6 inetutils-traceroute fish libpython2.7-minimal
  libgraphicsmagick++-q16-12 ldnsutils libpython2.7-stdlib
  imagemagick-6-common
Learn more about Ubuntu Pro at https://ubuntu.com/pro

All those packages are part of the “universe” repository, which is a mostly-community curated repository.

With Ubuntu Pro, Canonical is apparently starting to do more curation of the Universe repo, and pushing fixes upstream. Some posts have been made about a 90 day expedited access to the repo, meaning direct access to Canonical’s fixes without waiting for those fixes to be pushed upstream, merged, repackaged, and pushed out again.

Martin Wimpress, the developer of the Mate Desktop, current Canonical employee, etc., raised this on a Linux Downtime podcast (episode 64), just before the 03m00s timestamp. Note that I’m making some inferences and you should listen and make up your own mind.

Here’s a little script to test the repository of the packages from the excerpt above:

apt show    ansible imagemagick imagemagick-6-common imagemagick-6.q16  \
libimage-magick-perl libimage-magick-q16-perl libjs-jquery-ui       \
libmagick++-6-headers libmagick++-6.q16-8 libmagick++-6.q16-dev     \
libmagickcore-6-headers libmagickcore-6.q16-6 libmagick++-dev       \
libmagickwand-6-headers libmagickwand-6.q16-6 libmaven3-core-java   \
libopenexr25 libopenexr-dev libpython2.7-dbg libpython2.7-minimal   \
libpython2.7-stdlib python2.7 python2.7-dbg python2.7-minimal       \
2>/dev/null | grep -E "^Package|Section"

https://bclug.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/ubuntu-pro-test.sh

By admin

Linux admin, JS / React / Python / Perl developer.