[SRU] Update to 2021.04.07 or higher

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Please remove youtube-dl package from Ubuntu, if you're not going to maintain it and point people directly to the GithHub page.

It's getting frequently updated on getdeb.net:

http://www.getdeb.net/app/youtube-dl

Just to mention this.

My experience agrees. I've found it imperative to upgrade the script on a regular basis to ensure it keeps working. YouTube messes with stuff all the time, and it's rarely long before an outdated version breaks. I had to abandon using the official package and just maintain my own local copy (fortunately, ‘youtube-dl -U’ makes this pretty quick and painless).

@ travisgevans

Guessing this option is pretty well described in the programs documentation:

Either youtube-dl -help or man youtube-dl ?

The current version in Xenial is also broken.

I think someone should write this up in a post to <email address hidden>, and also offer to do the work. I'm not on the SRU team but I don't see on the face of it why this would be rejected in principle, assuming that compatibility is always maintained (for example commandline switches are never removed).

This is still a problem, by the way. I may have made a duplicate of this bug.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/youtube-dl/+bug/1704368

Any news?

Hello an youtube-dl current maintainer here. I'd like to write something as a vote for this issue.

There were several times, that a new version
with important fixes (fix for YouTube downloading, etc.) was released, and
lots of people came to our issue tracker for "broken" YouTube downloading
because the Ubuntu version was not updated yet. As a result, I hope Ubuntu can
keep it updated. Of course users can also install from PPAs or maintain youtube-dl version themselves. I
just feel the official package integrates with the system better, and IMO users are likely to try official packages first.

Just for the record, I have uploaded a new version of youtube-dl to Debian unstable.

It would be super nice if people pulled it from there (or from testing, if the recent phantomjs recommends can't be satisfied/is not desired).

Actually, it would be super nice to have it updated to avoid people pestering upstream.

Rogério Brito.

I am unable to download videos with the 2019.1.17 version packaged for Ubuntu 19.04. The current version is 2019.8.13. It would be better to not have this package in the repositories, considering that youtube-dl comes with its own updating mechanism.

Youtube-dl is outdated and does not work in focal as well.

The latest manually installed youtube-dl package from hirsute works fine.

Please fix this issue.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

On behalf of the Ubuntu SRU team, please consider this request approved in principle. Specifically, our policy already allows for youtube-dl updates in stable releases as required in order to keep it working. See "Updates that need to be applied to Ubuntu packages to adjust to changes in the environment, server protocols, web services, and similar, i. e. where the current version just ceases to work." from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#High-impact_bugs.

However, updating the package requires someone to actually volunteer the fix, and perform the necessary QA. Until that happens, you cannot expect the package to get updated.

It's worth noting that a youtube-dl snap exists and appears up-to-date. Snaps work far better for this kind of case and were, in part, designed to fix exactly this kind of update problem. If you prefer not to use the snap then that's your choice. But I hope this explains why you're less likely to find volunteers to fix this issue the hard way when the problem is already not an issue the easy way.

If you are able to volunteer, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates to understand what you need to do, and specifically the steps at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Procedure.

I'm also going to rename this bug. "Always backport newer versions" is an impossible bug to fix because the bug can never be marked resolved, and is thus not a helpful thing to track. I'm going to change it to a particular version so that the bug can actually have a specific goal. If/when the goalpost moves, the bug title can be updated if the previous goal is unlikely to be achieved. If the goal is achieved then we'll mark it Fix Released, and the next time an update is required, please use a new bug to track that.

To start, I'm going to take the statement from @asciiwolf "The latest manually installed youtube-dl package from hirsute works fine" and assume that 2021.04.07-0ubuntu1 and above still works, but 2020.03.24-1 and lower does not work. So this bug, for now, can track a backport of 2021.04.07 or higher to Focal and Bionic, and can be marked Fix Released for Hirsute and the current Ubuntu development release.

Reminder: this bug will not get fixed until somebody volunteers to do the work. The workaround is to use the youtube-dl snap which appears up-to-date.

Note that if a volunteer chooses to update to something higher than 2021.04.07 to resolve this bug, then Hirsute is also required to be updated to avoid users regressing when upgrading up to it. In this case, the Hirsute task should be reopened.