Comment 8 for bug 1957101

As someone who deploys many, many machines every month I would also like to be able to skip unattended-upgrades, simply because it takes way too long. A regular installation takes almost 25 minutes, and a good 20 minutes of that is spent on unattended-upgrades. This is because unattended-upgrades is configured by default with the "minimal steps" option.

A useful alternative to skipping unattended-upgrades would be to allow configuring unattended-upgrades to *not* use minimal steps when running, i.e. set

    Unattended-Upgrades::MinimalSteps "false";

somewhere in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/.

This would at least dramatically speed up the installation: without minimal steps unattended-upgrades is done in about 3 minutes. I have tested this by manually adding the above setting in /target/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99zzz-unattended-non-minimal during installation, just before unattended-upgrades runs.

Unfortunately there is no way to set this option and have it persist until unattended-upgrades runs.

Using

    apt:
      conf: |
        Unattended-Upgrades::MinimalSteps "false";

sets the option in /target/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/94curtin-config but that file is deleted after curtin has set up the configured APT sources and before unattended-upgrades runs.

There would need to be a dedicated setting for subiquity that adds this option to (probably) https://github.com/canonical/subiquity/blob/main/subiquity/server/controllers/install.py#L472 .