[Bug 2039492] Re: [SRU] plasma-distro-release-notifier gets EOL data from git.launchpad.net

[Erich Eickmeyer]

** Description changed:

  [Impact]
  
  This isn't really an impact to users, but is certainly an impact to
  Launchpad's servers. plasma-distro-release-notifier is an upgrade
  notifier for plasma desktops and is seeded in Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio.
  Its primary function is to notify users of a new upgrade available and
  when they will no longer receive updates to their current Ubuntu
  version. Since this impacts two flavors, for LTS versions, this is 3
  years.
  
  However, in its present form, plasma-distro-release-notifier gets its
  information from https://git.launchpad.net/plasma-distro-release-
  notifier/plain/eol.json?h=eol and checks that exact URL every login.
  This may have an impact on Launchpad's git servers.
  
  Simon Quigley has been kind enough to patch plasma-distro-release-
  notifier to use Ubuntu's distro-info-data to grab the information from
  /usr/share/distro-info/ubuntu.csv while subtracting two years for LTS
  releases since Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio only support LTS releases for
  three years. Simon has also sent this patch upstream.
  
  Simon's work upstream has stalled-out. Instead I have moved the eol.json
  file to be a local file and pointed the URL to be a local file:// to get
  the file from the machine locally. Ideally it would just get the
  information from distro-info-data per Simon's patch, but this works for
  now.
  
  [Test Case]
  
   * Simply install Ubuntu Studio or Kubuntu, any supported version.
  
   * Upon login, plasma-distro-release-notifier will grab eol.json from
  git.launchpad.net via the above URL. This is not desired.
  
   * Simon's patch removes this requirement and uses on-disk distro-info-
  data instead, and my patch just gets the eol.json file locally.
  
+  * To trigger with the new version, Jammy will already be popping-up
+ that 24.04 is available. For Noble, edit the on-disk json file at
+ /usr/share/distro-release-notifier/eol.json.
+ 
  [What could go wrong]
  
  This notifier was originally used in KDE Neon, and as such, had to be
  patched to work with Ubuntu. KDE Neon still would pull from KDE's
  servers to get the json file to calculate the EOL dates This patch does
  rewrite a lot of that code, but seems to be solid nonetheless.
  
  Attached is a screenshot of 22.04 in a VM, set to normal upgrades, and
  being "tricked" into thinking it's about to go EOL via date rewrites in
  /usr/share/distro-info/ubuntu.csv and it seems to work wonderfully.
  
  With the local eol.json file, this uses the QUrl class of Qt to grab the
  file:// URL of a local file. This has the same effect of grabbing it
  from another source except it does it locally and therefore prevents the
  DoS issue we were having on Launchpad. This is documented at
  https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qurl.html#fromLocalFile. I imagine this could go
  wrong in that it might not actually work, in which case it will just no-
  op and not report the number of days left until EOL for Kubuntu and
  Ubuntu Studio.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2039492

Title:
  [SRU] plasma-distro-release-notifier gets EOL data from
  git.launchpad.net

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