unattended-upgrades should probably be Recommends, not Depends

[Colin Watson]

There was a somewhat acrimonious thread on ubuntu-users@ recently due to unattended-upgrades being marked as a dependency of the ubuntu-mate-core metapackage, starting at:

  https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2017-October/291825.html

Despite the intemperate language there, I think it's reasonable to say that unattended-upgrades doesn't quite meet the usual threshold for being marked as a dependency of the core metapackage: it does make sense to have it there by default, but the system will function fine without it if somebody has special requirements. I suggest some variant of this patch to the seeds:

=== modified file 'core'
--- core 2017-10-08 21:25:51 +0000
+++ core 2017-10-18 08:56:20 +0000
@@ -140,7 +140,7 @@ We use gnupg's pinentry support as of wi
  * (sessioninstaller)
  * software-properties-gtk
  * ubuntu-release-upgrader-gtk
- * unattended-upgrades
+ * (unattended-upgrades)
  * update-manager
  * update-notifier
  * (whoopsie)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg)]

The unattended-upgrades package breaks a lot of use cases. Please allow people to uninstall it.

Just remove it completely from Depends/Recommends, it will be pulled in the live CD and in installations anyway in the same way that ubuntu-desktop does it, indirectly via software-properties-gtk:

http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/germinate-output/ubuntu.bionic/all
unattended-upgrades | python3-software-properties (Recommends)

...while in Ubuntu MATE currently it is:
http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/germinate-output/ubuntu-mate.bionic/all
unattended-upgrades | Ubuntu-Mate.Bionic core seed

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-mate-meta - 1.216

---------------
ubuntu-mate-meta (1.216) bionic; urgency=medium

  * Refreshed dependencies
  * Removed libp11-kit-gnome-keyring from core, desktop (LP: #1745055)
  * Removed python3-aptdaemon.gtk3widgets from core, desktop (LP: #1673258)
  * Moved unattended-upgrades to core-recommends, desktop-recommends (LP: #1724499)

 -- Martin Wimpress <email address hidden> Wed, 28 Feb 2018 01:48:26 +0000