[Bug 2040525] [NEW] running on LTS shouldn't warn because the devel branch can't be determined by distro-info

[Tired Sysadmin]

Public bug reported:

Running on 22.04.3 LTS, specifically package version 2.8ubuntu1.

The unattended-upgrades.log is full of
    WARNING Could not figure out development release: Distribution data outdated. Please
    check for an update for distro-info-data. See /usr/share/doc/distro-info-data/README.Debian
    for details.

The note in README.Debian boils down to "make sure -updates is in
sources.list", which it already is.

This warning is triggered by the Unattended-Upgrade::DevRelease setting
in /etc/apt/50unattended-upgrades being set to auto (the default).  The
code in /usr/bin/unattended-upgrades then calls
distro_info.UbuntuDistroInfo().devel() which then throws a
DistroDataOutdated.

(I don't know *why* it's throwing that, as...

$ distro-info --devel
noble

...but that's neither here nor there for purposes of this bug report.)

Can the "Unattended-Upgrade::DevRelease == auto" code path be made a
little smarter for LTS releases?  Testing "if currently running LTS then
we're definitely not 'devel' in any case, so it doesn't matter how
recent the distro-data file is, don't even bother checking it" seems
reasonable.  Or possibly 'Unattended-Upgrade::DevRelease' should default
to false on LTS releases, although I appreciate that changing the
default conffiles based on LTS-or-not can easily lead to some surprises.

** Affects: unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2040525

Title:
  running on LTS shouldn't warn because the devel branch can't be
  determined by distro-info

Status in unattended-upgrades package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Running on 22.04.3 LTS, specifically package version 2.8ubuntu1.

  The unattended-upgrades.log is full of
      WARNING Could not figure out development release: Distribution data outdated. Please
      check for an update for distro-info-data. See /usr/share/doc/distro-info-data/README.Debian
      for details.

  The note in README.Debian boils down to "make sure -updates is in
  sources.list", which it already is.

  This warning is triggered by the Unattended-Upgrade::DevRelease
  setting in /etc/apt/50unattended-upgrades being set to auto (the
  default).  The code in /usr/bin/unattended-upgrades then calls
  distro_info.UbuntuDistroInfo().devel() which then throws a
  DistroDataOutdated.

  (I don't know *why* it's throwing that, as...

  $ distro-info --devel
  noble

  ...but that's neither here nor there for purposes of this bug report.)

  Can the "Unattended-Upgrade::DevRelease == auto" code path be made a
  little smarter for LTS releases?  Testing "if currently running LTS
  then we're definitely not 'devel' in any case, so it doesn't matter
  how recent the distro-data file is, don't even bother checking it"
  seems reasonable.  Or possibly 'Unattended-Upgrade::DevRelease' should
  default to false on LTS releases, although I appreciate that changing
  the default conffiles based on LTS-or-not can easily lead to some
  surprises.

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