Welcome and Boutique Daily Builds

Development Discussion
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Welcome and Software Boutique will be undergoing a fair amount of improvements in the Artsy (17.10) cycle, including the introduction of a dedicated Software Boutique, and unifying the version across 16.04, 16.10 and 17.04.

This is your ticket to be on-board for test driving the latest changes, even if you’re not running 17.10.

What are daily builds?

  • These are development versions built straight from the code repository within 24 hours of new changes being committed.
  • A chance for testers and early birds to check out the latest changes before they go stable.
  • Builds are automatically generated no more then once a day.
  • Bugs and broken features are inevitable.

Opt in!

This will update your current version in-place. Builds are the same and available across:

  • 16.04 - Xenial
  • 16.10 - Yakkety
  • 17.04 - Zesty
  • 17.10 - Artful
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/welcome-daily
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade ubuntu-mate-welcome

To downgrade, simply remove the daily PPA and re-install Welcome.

Both the Welcome “stable” and Welcome “daily” PPA can co-exist, but the daily PPA will naturally contain a higher version.

Changelog

See the commit log to get an idea of the changes that have happened.

Where to report bugs

You can report reproducible bugs on:

If it’s a problem with Boutique software (e.g. Antiviral and the infinite Caja bug), please use the #development-discussion category on this forum with #boutique tag. With enough feedback, software can be pulled out in these instances. Note that for development versions of Ubuntu MATE, this will be expected.

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Is it intended that the daily build shows 16.04.2 as “Unsupported Distribution”?

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Either ubuntu-mate-desktop or ubuntu-mate-core isn’t installed on your computer – it’s how Boutique determines whether the user is actually using Ubuntu MATE or another distribution.

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ubuntu-mate-desktop was missing, thanks.

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Maybe there is a better way? ubuntu-mate-desktop has lots of dependencies and just a small tweak to the system will remove it. ubuntu-mate-core might not have as many dependencies, but it recently got removed when I un-installed the unattended-upgrades package.

Anyway, I have not opted for Welcome daily builds. And despite these two meta-packages not being present on my system it shows "Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS" in Welcome. I'm happy it says "Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS" instead of "Unsupported Distribution" because that sounds a lot more worrying.

The only reason these meta-packages exist is for distro-upgrades, so maybe create a separate "identifier-package" which can come preinstalled in Ubuntu MATE and doesn't have any dependencies. I don't know much about this, but those meta-packages tend to disappear quicker than quick.

I'm using UM 16.04 now after getting rid of Network Manager (wicd instead) and installing Compiz Reloaded. It was a rocky road, but I'm happy here.

Nevertheless I would suggest not making UM Welcome/Boutique too Ubuntu MATE specific. Anything Ubuntu-based should be able to take advantage of this work I think. Just make sure you stay in control over decision-making/development. No need for big changes as I see it, it's already a great application. :+1:

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FWIW, after 16.04 (so 16.10 and 17.04), the meta-packages use recommends instead of depends, so they are not removed if you uninstall built-in apps. I’ve removed all sorts of things in 16.10, like Libreoffice and Thunderbird, and the meta-package stayed put.

3 Likes