John Scott wrote:

I'm looking to help a couple people I know personally get up and running with Debian very soon, and I hope to help many more. Speaking from experience, my primary concern is that Debian on the desktop does not notify users at all when a new release is

made or when the current release is losing support. PackageKit does a great job at handling ordinary package upgrades for users such as through GNOME Software, but although I think PackageKit has bits to help users with release upgrades (or at least to
inform them of such), I don't believe the Debian-specific bits have been implemented to support this.


That would be because they happen every year-and-a-half to two
years or so, and the reasonable window for doing a major upgrade
is about a year long.

If you have apticron installed, and
/etc/alias pointing "root" at the primary desktop user's email,
then the user will get email each time there are new package
updates ready for them to install.

When they do that, they will eventually see notes like:

* Change /etc/debian_version to 10.12, for Debian 10.12 point release.

and eventually, someday, they will see a note like:

"bookworm has been renamed oldstable; trixie is the new stable
release"

But if you need things to happen in PackageKit, for whatever
reason, you could talk to the PackageKit maintainers.

-dsr-

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On 1/6/25 03:50, John Scott wrote:

Hi,

I'm looking to help a couple people I know personally get up and running with Debian very soon, and I hope to help many more. Speaking from experience, my primary concern is that Debian on the desktop does not notify users at all when a new release is

made or when the current release is losing support. PackageKit does a great job at handling ordinary package upgrades for users such as through GNOME Software, but although I think PackageKit has bits to help users with release upgrades (or at least to
inform them of such), I don't believe the Debian-specific bits have been implemented to support this.

I was surveying the state of the art and https://wiki.debian.org/AutomatedUpgrade#line-14 explains this well. As recently as last year I had a comrade still running Debian 8 from many years ago, simply because "no news is good news". That wiki page is

concerned with automating the upgrade process so it's less manual. My current priority is much smaller: my buddies could simply use notifications on the lock screen or elsewhere that say "Debian 256 is out; check out the release notes or poke John to
plan an upgrade at your convenience."

The bits are already there: with PackageKit aside, distro-info, base-files, and the debian-security-support packages all have (or can get) machine-readable information that can help facilitate this. libnotify or setting a parameter in GDM can display

notifications on the desktop (a systemd timer and/or xdg-autostart for login?) or lock screen respectively. It seems like this problem is probably tractable but I'll need to write my own code to glue everything together.

I guess my question is, do I understand everything right? Does anyone have a more ready-made solution to solve this need? If not, that's not a big problem—I just want to stay close to the state-of-the-art.

Thanks

I do not understand why a subscription to the announce list (https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/debian-announce) would not suffice.

..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............

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Uhm, and/or (@lists.debian.org):
debian-security-announce
debian-stable-announce
debian-news
debian-announce (as you'd mentioned)
gee, and then there's also LTS, and various languages, and ...
don't want to hammer installing users with too many questions (Debian
already gets enough complaints about that), also, subscribing users
from installer may not even be feasible, e.g. installations can be done,
for example, off-line, or where no Internet email nor http/https
access is available.
So, do you want to handle writing the code for all those possibilities
and recruit
translators to translate that into all the languages the installer
supports? :-)
Perhaps more practical is relevant mention in the installation documentation, if it's not already there. Then the only problem is getting folks to actually read the most excellent fabulous lovely documentation. :-/

I do not understand why a subscription to the announce list (https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/debian-announce) would not suffice.

That's certainly something that could be asked during the installer. We already ask people if they'd like to join the Popularity Contest; it
might be reasonable to add a new screen to the installer asking for an
email address to be subscribed to debian-announce (with, of course, the option to skip this, because you don't want to _keep_ subscribing people
if they're installing multiple machines :D ),

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