Ubuntu LINUX Update with Untrusted Packages

There were times when a LINUX update was really risky. Nowadays, with Ubuntu, it has become quite reliable. Nevertheless I encountered strange messages on today's upgrade. U-U-U.

What Happened

I made following screenshot after the upgrade, so you don't see the many packages the updater announced. Anyway, this is the dialog you see when you launch the Ubuntu software-updater.

So, imagine there were a lot of packages in this list, almost 1 GB download volume. I clicked "Install Now" and saw this:

I saw the "Settings" button and clicked it to see what's inside, essentially to allow upgrading untrusted packages. This is the dialog that opened:

I did not find an option to allow update of untrusted packages. I could have disabled "unsupported updates", but does this include "untrusted packages"?

Anyway, I clicked "Close" without having changed anything, and the software updater opened again. I thought it would be impossible to find out the untrusted packages in 1 GB download volume, so once more I clicked "Install". This resulted in following error message:

This was the end, when I clicked "OK", the update was over, without having done anything.

How I Fixed It

Such imprecise error messages are hard to evaluate. I did not observe any network instability. When I tried again to launch the software updater, it had no problem downloading its update information. But the same problem happened again when I tried to "Install", it complained about untrusted packages.

So I started to search for untrusted candidates in that very big list, and suspected Opera and Skype.

As soon as I deactivated their update in the list, it worked!

So what? I do not understand. Why are untrusted packages in the update list when they prevent update anyway? To avoid such pitfalls in future I deactivated their update in the "Settings" dialog:

After this, when I launched the software updater, I saw following message (instead of the list of packages to update):

What to Learn

Being user-friendly seems to not always be a goal of open source software :-)

• Software should not confront the user with unmanageable situations,
• instead it should tell the user how to get around the problem.
• When there is no known workaround, it should give very precise information about what happened, so that the user may find help elsewhere.
• An "Ok" button should never terminate an application. Such would have to be labeled "Exit" or "Quit".
• Avoid dialogs. They restrict the freedom of the user, and nobody knows where they lead to.