[feature request] ua status to provide unattended-upgrades status

[Eric Desrochers]

'Unattended-upgrades' is something enabled by default, but most customer aren't aware about it nor have an easy way to visualize it.

While we are currently working to modify our current onboarding and all documentation to do a better job at communicating it, we think it might be interesting to have 'unattended-upgrades' status as part of the 'ua' client.

Example:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ ua status
SERVICE AVAILABLE DESCRIPTION
cc-eal no Common Criteria EAL2 Provisioning Packages
esm-apps yes UA Apps: Extended Security Maintenance
esm-infra yes UA Infra: Extended Security Maintenance
fips no NIST-certified FIPS modules
fips-updates no Uncertified security updates to FIPS modules
livepatch yes Canonical Livepatch service
=> unattended-upgrades yes Automatic installation of security upgrade
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

Hi Eric, I like the idea and have a few questions about how the client's behavior would interact with unattended-upgrades:

For example, how should the client determine what status to report? If the user has at least the default config enabled is that enough for the client to report yes? What if the security pocket gets disabled?

If a user wanted to disable unattended-upgrades, would the client remove the package?

If a user wanted to enable unattended-upgrades, would the client enable the default config?

[Chris Johnston (cjohnston)]

To me, this doesn't make much sense.. ua status is reporting on which features of ua are enabled.. unattended-upgrades isn't a part of ua, but a config option on the machine.. Some other command could maybe be good for this, it just doesn't make sense here IMO.

[Richard Harding (rharding)]

I think this is a really interesting idea. There's a vision for the tool to be more useful as a general "state of the machine" and unattended-upgrades would fit into this story. I'm migrating this bug to the upstream project and will make sure to highlight the idea with the team and see how this might fit into future plans.

[Richard Harding (rharding)]

I've migrated it here: https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-advantage-client/issues/1244. Marking this bug as won't fix as it's not so much a package issue, but the upstream software functionality.