Update manager complains about the battery even when it starts itself

[Jeffrey Baker]

Binary package hint: update-manager

update-manager gained in Karmic the fantastically annoying ability to complain about your laptop being on battery. That's OK, I can live with that, there are probably people with oatmeal for brains who might try to dist-upgrade without sufficient power supply.

However!

There is no excuse for update-manager complaining about the power supply when update-manager *starts itself*. Seriously that is really infuriating. If update-manager is so worried about my battery life, I wish it would kindly stop itself from appearing in the first place, if the machine is running on battery power.

[Jeffrey Baker (jwbaker)]

Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: update-manager 1:0.126.9
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-19.56-generic
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-19-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin audio cdrom dialout dip floppy fuse lpadmin plugdev video

[Jeffrey Baker (jwbaker)]

This annoying bug is still present in lucid.

[Gregory P Smith (gpshead)]

Confirmed. this behavior sucks. I'm against update battery notification happening *ever* when the battery is >20% but regardless it should never happen from an automated update run.

[epv (epvubuntu)]

Yes indeed. Annoying.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The problem with never prompting on battery power is quite simple: someone may always use their notebook on battery, never on AC, charging it only when it is sleeping or turned off. In that case, they would never be prompted.

With the fix to bug 426708, the prompt is in the main window, rather than a separate alert, and says "It’s safer to connect the computer to AC power before updating." I think this removes the annoyance describes here. If so, this is a duplicate. If not, I think this will have to be Invalid.