Blaise Alleyne

Removing ownCloud from Ubuntu: Since when does "upgrade" mean "remove"?

Blaise Alleyne at

Ugh. Okay, so I don't care about all the debates about what's best for security right now, but the UX is freaking terrible.

I run updates on my Ubuntu machine, and owncloud gets removed??? Since when should apt-get upgrade have essentially the same effect as running apt-get remove owncloud???

Bah. Now my owncloud install is gutted and I've got to spend time this morning setting up a new package that I was not planning to spend today.

I'm pretty pissed...

Stephen Michael Kellat, lnxwalt@microca.st likes this.

Stephen Michael Kellat, jrobertson, jrobertson, jrobertson and 2 others shared this.

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>> Stephen Michael Kellat:

“A number of upstreams do not want to be packaged such as calibre oddly enough. We don't want to eviscerate the archive.”


Then maybe they shouldn't release their work as Free Software, should they? O_o


I understand the distribution not wanting to "fight" with unwilling upstreams, but something like "ok, we won't include it in the next release" sounds more coherent.


Removing packages from under users' feet sounds pretty crazy to me. Especially when said packages are Free Software, not a case of "whooops, this was illegal software and we didn't know!".

JanKusanagi @identi.ca at 2014-12-04T17:59:38Z

Blaise Alleyne, lnxwalt@microca.st likes this.

The we don't want distros to include this in the package manager (despite my POV that direct download is far better for these kinds of applications) sounds suspiciously like some major sponsor is about to take OC open-core.

In other words, it seems like it is more about revenue extraction than about product quality (else project could attempt to assist distro maintainers in keeping packages up-to-date).

lnxwalt@microca.st at 2014-12-04T18:34:11Z

I've already switched to the OBS repository. I was planning to do that anyways, having heard about the issue... just, wasn't planning on spending time on it this morning.

The debconf warning screen did pop up through the Ubuntu updater GUI, but there wasn't (or didn't seem to be) any way to abandon it at that point -- it cleared out everything but my files and database.

It actually wiped out my config.php too! But, I have backups.

It wasn't too hard to install via OBS, drop my old config.php in place, and connect with the MySQL db and my data directory. It's just, I wish I didn't have to do that today.

Blaise Alleyne at 2014-12-04T18:52:13Z

lnxwalt@microca.st likes this.

Isn't ownCloud already open core? It has Community and Enterprise Editions. https://owncloud.com/

Blaise Alleyne at 2014-12-04T18:54:11Z