Comment 25 for bug 1920836

Confirmed here that /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/status.json is only updated when running 'ua status' as root.

No desktop software is running as root, in the few cases that root privileges are required a small service is run as root and that is communicated with via D-Bus.

The warning doesn't show for the majority of users, since they aren't going to be running from the command line so I would leave it for now, and remove in the next revision of this code.

I think there is a case where this won't work - if you have a fresh machine that you haven't done a 'ua attach' on then software-properties is going to not offer ESM as it's not going to think it's available.

In https://code.launchpad.net/~robert-ancell/software-properties/+git/software-properties/+merge/400153 that 'ua status' can timeout and return empty values, which is why we are accessing /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/status.json. Is there a reason why the ua client doesn't do this itself internally, i.e. it gives you fresh json or returns the cached copy if it can't do the update?