14.04 LTS: inaccurate reports of packages available at login

[John Hupp]

On 5/24/2014 1:04 AM, Nikhil Nair wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I switched from Ubuntu server 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS fairly recently.  
> One
> very odd change in behaviour I've noticed is that, when the number of
> packages available for upgrade (and the number which are security 
> upgrades)
> are reported at login time, they're often quite outdated.  This wasn't 
> the
> case under 12.04 LTS.
>
> Just now, the report said there was 1 package available; when I ran "sudo
> apt-get dist-upgrade", it turned out there were 7.  I'm sure there have
> been cases when it reported there were none, so I didn't try, but, in 
> fact,
> there were (some of which may have been security updates...).
>
> On the other hand, on other occasions after upgrading, I've logged out 
> and
> logged back in perhaps 20 minutes later, and the number of available
> packages had increased; but, when I did another apt-get dist-upgrade, 
> there
> were none.
>
> I presume some sort of caching was done to save too-frequent checks of 
> the
> database, or, perhaps, to speed up the login process.  However, this
> definitely looks like a bug to me!
>
> What's the way forward - will someone pick it up from here, or do I 
> need to
> lodge a bug report?  If the latter, how does that work - if I have to
> associate the report with a particular package, which package would I
> choose here?  (Sorry, not familiar with the Ubuntu bug reporting system;
> any pointers to the appropriate documentation would be appreciated.)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Nikhil.
>

I'm a Lubuntu user myself, but if Ubuntu 14.04 also uses update-manager 
for its automatic updates (and I think it does), then this is probably 
expected behavior under Phased Updates.  See 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PhasedUpdates

Note that though update-manager respects phased updates, Synaptic and 
apt-get do not.  Hence the disparity.