[Bug 1886161] Re: Unattended upgrades should work on roaming laptops

[Robin]

Just an update, for what it's worth.

I solved this problem with a shell script triggered by Network Manager's
"up" hook. Because UU does not update the package list, I had to resort
to a `apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade` with
`DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive` and a whole bunch of options to make
sure everything runs reliably in the background. Convoluted and
laborious.

But now my Ubuntu is *always* up to date. Before, it regularly went
*months* without a security update.

Putting aside whose fault it is, this absolutely IS a problem.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1886161

Title:
  Unattended upgrades should work on roaming laptops

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in gnome-settings-daemon package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  For many if not most laptop computers, Unattended Upgrades seems all
  but useless by design.

  For upgrades to happen, with default config, 3 conditions must be met:

  - an internet connection must be up and running when the timer or cron or anacron tries the unattended upgrade
  - the connection must not be metered, whatever that means (Skip-Updates-On-Metered-Connections "true")
  - the computer must be plugged in (OnlyOnACPower "true")

  These are insurmountable problems for many laptops on the go.
  Inevitably, security upgrades will almost never run unattended on such
  computers. I discovered with shock that Unattended Upgrades had almost
  never run on my laptop. I tried all possible config tweaks. Nothing
  worked reliably and in the end I gave up and wrote a upgrade script
  which uses Network Manager's connection-up hook. Unattended Upgrades
  needs to do something like this out of the box. Users should not need
  to write scripts to ensure security upgrades.

  Unattended upgrades is an excellent project for servers. But it really
  needs to work, out of the box, on laptops too.

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