[Bug 1175637] Re: Kernel updates are being marked as manually installed

[Daniel Hartwig]

unattended-upgrade does not directly handle dependencies, and its only
effective calls are to ‘mark_upgrade’.

> 08:36 < slangasek> ah, there's a single call to
>                    mark_install() in u-a, so that would
>                    be nice and convenient if so

In ‘upgrade_in_minimal_steps’, but conditional on:

            elif not pkg.is_installed:
                pkg.mark_install()

so only called if somehow a not-installed package ends up in
pkgs_to_upgrade inside main.  There are many unconditional calls to
pkg.mark_upgrade that should generate a python-apt error for a
not-installed package in that list.

In any case, looking at the log Brian provided,
linux-image-3.2.0-44-generic is the package of interest, yet does not
appear in pkgs_to_upgrade (see the second to last line of the log,
starting “Packages that are upgraded:”).

> 08:35 < cjwatson> mark_install(from_user=False) I think?
>                   But check ...

This is a too common misconception. ‘FromUser’ is concerned with other
functions, such as whether to override a hold or not.  It must never
be used strictly for the side-effect of maybe setting auto-installed.
The only proper way to explicitly mark a package auto-installed is to
call ‘MarkInstall’ followed by ‘MarkAuto’, and most programs need not
be concerned with that unless e.g. they include their own dependency
solver.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1175637

Title:
  Kernel updates are being marked as manually installed

Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “unattended-upgrades” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Updates to the linux-image-* packages in Precise are being marked as
  "manually" installed, regardless of the auto/manual flag on the
  existing kernel packages. This happens when updating packages with
  apt, aptitude, or unattended-upgrades. I'm running an up-to-date
  12.04.2 LTS installed (amd64).

  I can see that my existing kernels were marked as automatically
  installed:

  % apt-mark showauto | grep linux-image
  linux-image-3.2.0-40-generic
  linux-image-generic

  And, after the update was performed by unattended-upgrades last night,
  the new kernel is marked manual:

  % apt-mark showmanual | grep linux-image
  linux-image-3.2.0-41-generic

  This is a problem, because it renders the fix in this bug,
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/923876 (Limit and
  clean-up kernel images and headers automatically in LTS) ineffective,
  since apt-get autoremove will not remove packages which are marked as
  manually installed.

  I'm running the following package versions:

  apt: 0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10.10
  aptitude: 0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10.10
  unattended-upgrades: 0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10.10
  aptdaemon: 0.43+bzr805-0ubuntu9

  This bug looks similar to
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/aptdaemon/+bug/1078544, however, I'm
  running a version of aptdaemon that supposedly has this fix applied.

  Please let me know if I can provide any other useful information.

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