14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Will Cooke has revealed recently the company's plans on removing some old, unmaintained Unity 7 Scopes from the Ubuntu Linux archives because they could threaten the security of the entire operating system.
April will see the release of Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system, but it also marks the fifth year of Unity user interface's implementation, which was first introduced as part of the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) release.
While Canonical's engineers are concentrating all of their efforts on bringing us the next-generation Unity 8 user interface, current Ubuntu Linux releases are still successfully using Unity 7, and so will Ubuntu 17.04.
Old, unmaintained Unity 7 Scopes are still out there
However, it would appear that the Ubuntu repositories still include some old, unmaintained Scopes that have security issues open, posing a threat to the entire system if installed and used.
Most of these are related to some popular music playback apps and include unity-scope-audacious, unity-scope-clementine, unity-scope-gmusicbrowser, unity-scope-guayadeque, unity-scope-musique, and unity-scope-gourmet.
Because of that, Canonical is planning on removing these and many other unmaintained Unity 7 Scopes from the official repositories, if their maintainers don't step up to patch any of the existing security issues, and also because Unity 8 won't support them.
"Couple this with the decision to turn off online searches by default and I think it's time to consider dropping these Scopes from the archive. Plus of course, the fact that they won't work in Unity 8 in the future anyway," said Will Cooke, Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical.
If you submitted a Unity 7 Scope in the past, and no longer offer security fixes for it, please do everyone a favor and remove it from the repositories as soon as possible. Unity 7 will be supported for a few more years, but it doesn't have to be insecure.