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View Full Version : [ubuntu] Upgrade Application Compatibility Checker?



neltnerb
June 4th, 2013, 06:23 PM
When I upgraded from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 and beyond, a bunch of applications which I have found no reasonable substitute for became incredibly buggy and nearly non-functional.

In my case, evolution and pidgin (with notification in the menu bar) in particular suffered horrible fates in 12.04 and 12.10.

I've managed to get them both usable again, but they're still both broken overall in 12.10.

So now I'm terrified to update to 13.04 since I can't tell anymore if an Ubuntu update will make my system break, or will actually fix previous bugs.

Is there any tool that does something like cross-reference major application bug reports against currently installed programs? That would make me much less terrified by the prospect of upgrading. I think it might help others as well if it was general enough that it applied to other problem suites.

Yeah, I know there is a bugtracker. Searching it makes me more scared since it says things like having libnotify for evolution installed causes evolution to crash constantly, so I won't be upgrading unless I see better support, but I imagine that this is a common worry now that subsequent Ubuntu releases seem to only get more broken.

Frogs Hair
June 4th, 2013, 11:02 PM
Many applications are community and not Canonical developed and so bugs need to be reported to and checked for at launchpad . There was a reason Evolution (Gnome Application) was replaced as the default mail client and again Launchpad is the only place where known problems are documented. I don't know of any other site or filter you could use. M.S. Windows had a compatibility page , but it was up to the software developers to test and post if their applications were compatible with new versions. Though code is checked before applications enter the Ubuntu repository, the responsibility for testing lies with the developer/s.