Ubuntu 20.04 and Flash?

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As we all know the Adobe Flash plugin will have been deprecated at this time next year.

Will Ubuntu ship it at all for 20.04 (and remove it in fall)?

And are there any plans to ship an alternative? From the known alternatives Gnash and Shumway seem to be abandoned more or less (with no commits for about 4 years). Just Lightspark seems to be actively developed. It was already in the official repositories for Xenial, but was removed since then obviously.

Is it possible to ship a current version for Focal? An independent effort was started here --> https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark/issues/355

Maybe this can be helped a bit from the Ubuntu devs?

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I think we should remove the Flash package/support entirely for 20.04 LTS. I don’t see any reason to attempt to go for alternatives - it’s usage is way down - let’s let the Flash format die.

20.04 LTS releases at end of April so that means 8 months max of total Flash support
20.04.1 likely releases at end of July so that means having Flash for just 5 months for the majority of users

Namely:

  • If possible compile Firefox without any NPAPI support, could also drop gtk2. - Which makes it much nicer to support Wayland
  • Drop pepperflashplugin-nonfree package from multiverse (does it even work anymore? )
  • Drop flashplugin-installer package from multiverse (might be removed from Debian)
  • Drop adobe-flashplugin package from archive.canonical.com - and possible consider retiring that archive entirely for Focal

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to say if you need Flash stay on 18.04 LTS an extra 5 months then you might otherwise.

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While I fully agree with all your points I think that shipping Lightspark in Universe would not hurt. And maybe there are still people around who are in the need for some kind of Flash support.

But I guess that there will be some PPA for that at some point.

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Lightspark was inherited from Debian and appears to have been removed as part of boost1.58 removal. Looks like lightspark devs have put in work to be more a standalone player (which would be needed as after 2020 no browsers will load Flash plugins of any kind - and I’m guessing most will kill generic plugin interfaces entirely). I don’t disagree it could be useful for some users, but someone would need to do the work to get it back in Debian.

The PPAs are unmaintained today - https://launchpad.net/~sparkers

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