update-notifier doesn't respect "automatically check for updates: Never"

[Erik Sax]

This has been a long-standing problem with various ubuntu installations, and I'm sensing some reticence in doing anything about it. This attitude also seems to be purposeful to try to cajole updates on people who make bad choices due to confusion/fud/paranoia.

apt install fails due to:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is another process using it?

A great deal of networking is taking place despite setting automatic upgrades to "never". Cycling this doesn't seem to do anything. This action is hostile to programmers and the setting should be respected.

Wisdom on threads is to let it update until it's out of updates, and then it supposedly respects the "never" flag, but the experience I'm having is much more non-deterministic. have been using 19.04 for weeks now and still get the background notifier using data and getting in the way of aptitude package installations. I prefer manual update && upgrade once my code is ready to push.

Is there another way around this or are people just living with it?

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, it seems like unattendeed-upgrade is happening anyway not respecting that settings which is confusing at best, it can also lead to use of unwanted data

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Could you include a ps axjf or some other process tree so we can see what's running when this happen?

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Also, is this a desktop machine / does it have PackageKit installed, and if so, which frontends for packagekit?

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Also, final question, did you turn off "Download and install automatically" for security updates?

If you only turn of "Automatically check for updates", then we won't automatically check for updates, but if you ran apt update, the next day-ish all updates will be downloaded automatically (it should be only security updates, but it also downloads non-security ones).

[Erik Sax (erikjsax)]

In the updates tab, I keep all three boxes checked under "Install updates from:", because I like to manually run `sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade` whenever I have a good stable release of software and feel like stomaching a raft of system changes.

In past versions of ubuntu going back 'Dapper Drake', I'd change the setting for "automatically check for updates" and it was generally good about respecting this setting from my recollection. I'm not sure which release changed this but it's for sure worse, the updater tries to run in the background, and I've noticed it's easy to repeat as I've installed 19.04 on various machines. I've got laptops and desktops alike with 19.04 installed, and they all have this problem. I tried letting it actually do the updates, but that didn't work so I generally cancel it.

This non-deterministic behavior is nonsensical. When update-notifier runs, check this flag and quit if it's set to 'Never'. There's really nothing else to debug, is there?

[Erik Sax (erikjsax)]

Did a PS on one of these systems this morning. Found some shenanigans.
root 3380 1 0 08:25 ? 00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/lib/apt/apt.systemd.daily install
root 3384 3380 0 08:25 ? 00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/lib/apt/apt.systemd.daily lock_is_held install
root 3415 3384 99 08:25 ? 00:00:09 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade

Grep for "updates" yielded this:
$ ps -ef | grep upgrade
root 1182 1 0 08:22 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/share/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrade-shutdown --wait-for-signal
root 3415 3384 14 08:25 ? 00:00:22 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
root 5356 3415 1 08:27 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade

After I killed 3415 I was able to get the apt lock and proceed with a manual `sudo apt-get upgrade`

[Erik Sax (erikjsax)]

This continues to happen, more aggressively on 19.04 than on previous versions. This system popped up with updates today has been running 19.04 the longest of all my systems with "never" as the selected option and it just keeps checking for updates. I've got two processes seemingly related, one was started by init

14921 1 0 08:37 tty2 00:00:15 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/update-manager --no-update --no-focus-on-map

The other must be the gui who has the gnome-session-binary as the parent process

2351 1704 0 08:28 tty2 00:00:00 update-notifier

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Erik Sax (erikjsax)]

This is a silly and very user hostile bug that is still present in 19.10. Seems crazy that it's basically being ignored.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

eoan has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that release

[David Keck (davekeck)]

In my case (Ubuntu 20.04.1), update-notifier was being spawned every time I log in (regardless of my software update settings) due to this file:

    /etc/xdg/autostart/update-notifier.desktop

This file has a "X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=60", causing a 60-second delay, so from a user's perspective it might seem like it appears randomly, rather than being triggered due to logging in.

In case it helps someone else, you can disable this behavior by renaming the file:

    sudo mv /etc/xdg/autostart/update-notifier.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/update-notifier.desktop.disabled