unattended-upgrades.service ignores (changes in) /etc/apt/preferences.d/ files

[Richard Arends]

unattended-upgrades.service ignores (changes in) /etc/apt/preferences.d/ files that are done after the service has started.

For example we 'pin' firefox on to a specific version and if a configuration file is placed after the service is started, the pinning is ignored. In our sitation that results in a newer firefox then we want at this moment.

We run Ubuntu on 2000+ workstations and our users often start a workstation and let it run for days/weeks before rebooting and thus restarting the service unattended-upgrades again.

I did not test if changes in other apt files are ignored also.

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

Files in /etc/apt/preferences.d/ are read when unattended-upgrade is run and not when u-u.service is started thus it is safe to assume that configuration changes take place without restarting u-u.service.
On the other hand there are cases when u-u does not respect pinning like the one reported here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=838920
Are all the repositories trusted on the affected systems?

[Richard Arends (l-lauuchpad-s)]

Hi Reczey,

Thanks for looking at this bug report. We observed that configuration changes on pinning files are only effective after restarting u-u.service. All the repos that we use, are trusted.

With regards,
Richard.

[Borim (borim)]

I have the same problem, unattended-upgrades ignores files under /etc/apt/preferences.d/*, but also after restarting the PC. The result is that unattended-upgrades breaks regularly my system :(

To fix this I have to run `apt upgrade` after unattended-upgrades updated programs to problematic versions.

As a workaround I blacklisted these programs in unattended-upgrades config: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades