Repo for Ubuntu 14.04 has disappeared

Hi All,

The repository for Ubuntu 14.04 seems to have disappeared!?

I have searched recent blogposts and changelogs but can't see any notice of this being a planned thing.

When doing an apt update I get...
Err http://download.opensuse.org Packages
404 Not Found [IP: 2001:67c:2178:8::13 80]
W: Failed to fetch http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/ownCloud:/desktop/Ubuntu_14.04/Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 2001:67c:2178:8::13 80]
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Sure enough http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/ownCloud:/desktop/ shows that Ubuntu 14.04 packages are missing.

Can anyone let me know if they will be coming back please?

Thank you

Hi,

ownCloud supports the last 2 Versions of a Linux distribution + LTS.

So 14.04 has been out of life for a long time. You should consider upgrading.

You may want to update your information. Both Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 LTS releases are current and supported. Both are supported for 5 years so Ubuntu 14.04 is fully supported until April 2019.

Non LTS releases are only supported for 9 months. As such ownCloud are currently supporting Ubuntu 17.04 which went End of Live in January 2018!

More details can me found on the Ubuntu Releases and Ubuntu release end of life pages.

Please fix this. Like many organisations we only use LTS releases and never use them past their EOL however OwnCloud has cut us off :-/

Edit: As releases come out every 6 months however there is only ever an LTS release every 2 years, there will always be 3 releases between each LTS release and always two LTS releases that are supported.

For Linux distributions, we support, if technically feasible, the latest 2 versions per platform and the previous LTS.

https://doc.owncloud.com/server/10.0/admin_manual/installation/system_requirements.html#desktop

Ubuntu 16.04, 17.04 and 17.10

https://doc.owncloud.com/server/10.0/admin_manual/installation/system_requirements.html#server

14.04 was the previous LTS, right? The last LTS is the 16.04?

I have looked it up, and yes, 14.04 is still supported

Correct.

Exactly :slight_smile:

Supported by Ubuntu. I have linked you ownCloud's policy regarding Linux distributions.

Yeah seems yo were bitten by our policy. The two latest releases, plus one LTS, if there is none amongst these two.

This policy does not work very well with Ubuntu:

a) We would support 17.10 and 17.04 as the latest two, but 17.04 is technically no longer possible, it disappeared already from the Ubuntu Mirrors.
b) 14.04 is not officially supported by owncloud, but it is apparently far from being dead.

The policy works quite well with other distros, though.

Thank you for explaining how this has happened.

Anything we can do about this or do we need to start planning our migration away from owncloud?

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is out next month and if you are planning on dropping support for 16.04 LTS then I think a lot of people are going to have major issues :-/

Right, 18.04 is on the door step, and supporting three different LTSes somehow seems not right.
Curious: Do you have no plans to move forward to 16.04 or even further?
As a server, 14.04 is old, but there might be good reasons to keep it up as long as feasable.
As a desktop, I'd be interested to learn why you don't update.

I am currently wearing my desktop client hat when referring to policy. With the server there was a more technical reason against 14.04: You are stuck with php-5.5.9 there.

With desktop client version 2.3.3 there came this deprecation notice:
https://oc.owncloud.com/index.php/email/emailWebview?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWTJNM056RXpORFV5TTJKayIsInQiOiJDQVhyemJXY3RudXVrTzBEcE5WS1lza0VZTUUzd2JMU2RYNHhyT0RZQS9pWE5peGwxcWI1R2FPd0VFQld6enZLbXJQRWNadUprNmViMDkrTGlsK2FZUnRML0Nmak1YK3I0L2hvblNSbWtKZ0twekNYcUU1VmtLQXVFOWhuU0ZaSSJ9

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Thank you @jnweiger, this is good info.

I feel our policy regarding both servers and desktop is the same as many other organisations....
We don't touch anything OS that isn't an LTS release. As such we only care about 14.04, 16.04 and 18.04.
Any new severs/desktops get the latest LTS release (although we usually wait until xx.04.1 for new releases for them to fix any bugs) and most kit is depreciated over three years. If anything is still in service after four years then we have a year to rebuild the server on the latest LTS release, therefore skipping an LTS release.

In reality you are right that most of our desktops are on 16.04 as we use them every day and like to rebuild each two years when xx.04.1 LTS comes out to get the shiny shiny. Any of our old 14.04 desktops can probably be updated as they are mostly shared devices. The issue for us in particular was that we have OwnCloud Desktop running on a handful of our 14.04 servers acting as gateways between OwnCloud and other technologies such as Dropbox that our clients use. These servers aren't going away until 18.04.01 is out and stable.

I understand your position, I just wanted to answer your question fully and give you our issues. If you are planning on dropping 16.04 support when 18.04 comes out then we are going to have some major issues here.

Thank you

No, it is not: the repository on opensuse.org is no longer there. I just looked it up.

Ubuntu 14.04 is an LTS version, and thus it is kept alive and supported by Ubuntu until 2019. Many many users still use it, because it was the last desktop using KDE4 and they don't like KDE5. So it would be nice if the owncloud desktop client for Ubuntu 14.04 would also be supported until 2019.

Hopefully, by then there will be a KDE version that is really usable and that feels as comfortable as KDE4 did, or there will be some new desktop that makes the upgrade to Ubuntu 19.x work without the need for cursing and sweating for months.

so...?

or are you referring to the repo on the owncloud site?

in that case:

ownCloud desktop sync client 2.3.4 is still available and works well on Ubuntu 14.04.

@jnweiger could you add the link to the 2.3.4 repo to https://owncloud.org/download/older-versions/ ?

My Mint 17 system is running client 2.4.0 when the repo disappeared, why should we backdate to 2.3.4?

We had pretty much the same discussion last September. Sigh.

https://central.owncloud.org/t/client-install-on-linux-mint-17-03-based-on-ubuntu-14-04/9321/4?u=jnweiger

Thank you for your responses (I genuinely mean that) it's good to have a discussion on this and I totally understand you have to draw the line somewhere.

Based on this we have started the gears moving to migrate away from OwnCloud. Again, I don't mean to sound like this is a threat, it is not :slight_smile: I just wanted to inform you all that this was the deal breaker for us and so we will be migrating our users over to something that is supported in the OS that we use. I don't know if you keep track of this information anywhere but wanted to at least put it here.

Thank you again.

Good news: the Ubuntu 14.04 repo returns. There will be no official support for this. It will be available as long as maintenance effort is trivial. E.g. build environment exists and works. This also means that I will give 2.5.x clients a try on 14.04 - best effort. Well, low effort, actually.

I've re-enabled the 14.04 repo in https://software.opensuse.org//download.html?project=isv%3AownCloud%3Adesktop&package=owncloud-client

If needed, I'll spend some free time tonight to make it work again.
Apologies to all those who went into efforts to workaround this situation. Especially as the efforts are obsolete as the repo returns.

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Rebuild succeded. Please test this on Ubuntu 14.04 (run as user root):

wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:ownCloud:desktop/Ubuntu_14.04/Release.key -O - | apt-key add -
echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/ownCloud:/desktop/Ubuntu_14.04/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/isv:ownCloud:desktop.list
apt-get update
apt-get install owncloud-client
owncloudcmd --version

  ownCloud version 2.4.1 (build 9083)
  Git revision cd60c2b88ac858339637575f124c58d88b42e78c
  Using Qt 5.6.2, built against Qt 5.6.2
  Using 'OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014'

Ubuntu themselves do not recommend updating to a new LTS version until the .1 update is released: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/installing-upgrading.html (at least, “do-release-upgrade” won’t do anything until then).

By dropping support for 14.04 when 18.04 is released, owncloud is either asking Ubuntu server admins to upgrade to 16.04 - a two year old release - or upgrade to 18.04 - a version that Ubuntu does not think is stable enough yet for production servers (or double their planned server upgrade cycle from once every 4 years to once every two years).

I urge owncloud to continue support for 14.04 until 18.04.2 is released – this would give 14.04 admins time to wait for 18.04.1, test the new version with any local customizations, and upgrade their servers before losing support for the old 14.04 server - an upgrade schedule based on real-world server admin practices.

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I’m not sure but from what i know ownCloud is just a PHP application and the owncloud-files package for Ubuntu seems to doesn’t have any dependencies.

It looks to me that you also just could use the 18.04 repositories on your 14.04 installation.