Incomplete packages listing - bionic not included

Interesting, there seem to be various definitions of what "active" and "supported" mean.

Currently, what the code uses as the default is UbuntuDistroInfo's definition of "supported":

    releases = config.get('releases', None)
    if releases is None:
        udi = UbuntuDistroInfo()
        releases = udi.supported()

In other words, same as this:

$ distro-info --supported
focal
jammy
lunar
mantic

However distro-info also includes a '--supported-esm' with additional releases considered "supported":

$ distro-info --supported-esm
trusty
xenial
bionic
focal
jammy

Launchpad also considers this broader set for it's "Supported Series" definition, as can be seen at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu

The tests command won't show triggers for series unless there are packages for that series in the PPA, so it seems reasonable to adopt the broader definition of "supported" and assume if there's packages present in the PPA for bionic, trusty, or xenial they should have triggers displayed.

If someone has been using a given PPA for a long time, they may have obsolete stuff in it for those old releases that they don't care about. I don't know how important this use case is, and they can still use the '-r' flag to limit to a subset if they wish. Still, I should probably give this some additional thought. (Opinions would be welcome...)

In any case, the improved code would need just one line to fix:

$ python3
Python 3.10.12 (main, Jun 11 2023, 05:26:28) [GCC 11.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from distro_info import UbuntuDistroInfo
>>> udi = UbuntuDistroInfo()
>>> releases = udi.supported()
>>> releases
['focal', 'jammy', 'lunar', 'mantic']
>>> releases.extend(r for r in udi.supported_esm() if r not in releases)
>>> releases
['focal', 'jammy', 'lunar', 'mantic', 'trusty', 'xenial', 'bionic']

> If someone has been using a given PPA for a long time, they may have obsolete stuff in it for those old releases that they don't care about.

You can delete packages from a ppa and as you said it's easy enough to filter those out. I would argue that it's better to potentially have some noise, which is still possible to skip, than to miss entries.