Track request for old but still supported Subiquity releases

store-requests tracks
1

Hello,

I would like to request tracks for the three versions of Subiquity that are still supported today but don’t have dedicated tracks:

  • 18.04/
  • 20.04/
  • 22.04/

The Subiquity project switched from latest/ to tracks shortly after 24.04. Nowadays we have the following tracks 24.04/, 24.10/, 25.04/, 25.10/, 26.04/.

ISOs that have been produced since the move to tracks ship a Subiquity snap tracking x.y/stable where x.y is the version of Ubuntu being installed (e.g., 25.10/stable when installing Ubuntu 25.10). Before switching to tracks, ISOs were built with a Subiquity snap tracking latest/stable/ubuntu-x.y (where x.y is the Ubuntu version number).

Unfortunately, the latest/stable/ubuntu-x.y branches get automatically closed every 30 days - and this has been causing various issues because typically, latest/stable contains code that is incompatible with old Ubuntu releases.

What would 18.04/, 20.04/ and 22.04/ tracks offer?

  1. we can instruct users of old ISOs to run snap switch subiquity --channel=x.y/stable if they run into problems when refreshing subiquity (typically because the latest/stable/ubuntu-x.y branch got closed and so they’re refreshing to latest/stable instead).
  2. for documentation purposes, this makes it clear which snap revisions of Subiquity each version of Ubuntu is compatible with (i.e., running snap info subiquity lists x.y/stable but not latest/stable/ubuntu-x.y). Users of old ISOs can also guess which revision to refresh to if they see it in the output of snapcraft info.
  3. if the relevant latest/stable/ubuntu-x.y automatically closes, we can automatically (more or less) reopen it by copying revisions from x.y/stable to latest/stable/ubuntu-x.y).

Here’s a previous request we made for creating the 26.04 track:

Thanks for considering this request! Olivier