daily unattended upgrade does not recover from interrupted dpkg run (regression)

[Ernst Kloppenburg]

ever since the daily unattended upgrade is run via systemd timers it does no longer recover from interrupted dpkg runs

in /usr/lib/apt/apt.systemd.daily, before the actual unattended-upgrade script is called, there is a call to
   apt-get check
which ends the daily update run with an error in this case. The log says
   error encountered in cron job with "apt-get check".

Before the switch to systemd timers, when a dpkg run was interrupted (requiring execution of dpkg --configure -a), the unattended upgrade script would recover from this (unless Unattended-Upgrade::AutoFixInterruptedDpkg was set to "false"). So this is a regression.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: apt 1.2.24
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.10.0-35.39~16.04.1-generic 4.10.17
Uname: Linux 4.10.0-35-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.10
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Sat Nov 11 15:49:14 2017
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-05-05 (554 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160420.1)
SourcePackage: apt
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

I can't follow. The apt-get check check has been there since 2007, and the check is the same since 2004.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

from precise (12.04):

# check if we can lock the cache and if the cache is clean
if which apt-get >/dev/null && ! eval apt-get check -f $XAPTOPT $XSTDERR ; then
    debug_echo "error encountered in cron job with \"apt-get check\"."
    exit 0
fi

I also verified that the implementation has not changed one level further. As such I don't see any change here. Maybe something else changed for you.

[Ernst Kloppenburg (ernst-kloppenburg)]

you are right, Julian, I am sorry. The behaviour has not changed at all compared to previous ubuntu releases.

In my case there was the dpkg inconsistency, requiring execution of 'dpkg --configure -a'

But at the same time there was some dependency problem which required calling 'apt -f install'

The latter made 'apt check' error out, but I attributed this to the former.