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I recently upgraded my Ubuntu from 19.04 to 20.04. And as always, the first thing that happens is that all third party software sources are disabled.

I'm sure there are good reasons to do that and I don't mind going back in and re-enabling them afterwards. But it is such a trivial and half way mechanical task that I can't imagine that some tool doesn't exist to help user here.

Software sources dialog

Basically such a tool would check all disabled software sources with a comment like "Disabled by upgrade to.." (the exact wording eludes me) then look at the deb source, go out and check which Ubuntu release is the most recent under the "dist" folder, and enter that name in the Distribution field.

Do anyone know of such a tool?

user1283068
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2 Answers2

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You no longer need to get them disabled. 3 methods got added as of 18.10:

An option to update-manager was added to keep PPAs enabled: AllowThirdParty = yes. Create a file ending in .cfg in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades.d/ and add 

[Sources]
AllowThirdParty = yes

This will keep all PPA's active.

You can also enable specific PPA's in the same file using 

[ThirdPartyMirrors]
{unique_name} = {url}

The value for {url} is the URL of the ppa you want to keep enabled and can be found in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

There was also a command line method added for both update and release upgrade: 

RELEASE_UPGRADER_ALLOW_THIRD_PARTY=1 update-manager -d
RELEASE_UPGRADER_ALLOW_THIRD_PARTY=1 do-release-upgrade -d

That basically is a one time option to keep 3rd party PPA enabled.

Rinzwind
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    Thanks for this. It is very helpful to know, but it doesn't solve the problem of bumping third party repositories up to the most recent distribution available. This tedious task is still a manual process of checking the dist folder. – user1283068 May 16 '20 at 12:53
4

You could use y-ppa-manager, it is a software for PPA management.

Info: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/y-ppa-manager-easily-search-add-remove.html

Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~webupd8team/+archive/ubuntu/y-ppa-manager

Lorenz Keel
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  • Thanks for the suggestion, but I already know y-ppa-manager. It has just about the most unhelpful GUI I have ever had the misfortune of using, and does not really solve any problem that the normal "Software & Updates" program in Ubuntu doesn't solve. – user1283068 May 16 '20 at 14:41
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    Well I haven't changed my mind on the quality and usability of this app but on a second glance I see that it does indeed have the functionality to re-enable PPA's that were disabled on upgrade, including finding the latest distro to use for those PPA's. So I'm going to accept this answer. – user1283068 Jun 09 '20 at 08:57
  • y-ppa-manager is not the most intuitive tool, methinks, but probably the only one I know that does exactly what the OP asked for. I wonder how this functionality is not built into the upgrader? – benzkji Apr 18 '22 at 06:33