Comment 41 for bug 1615381

For some reason the test case worked even with apt 1.6.14 as the following shows:

$ apt policy apt
apt:
  Installed: 1.6.14
  Candidate: 1.6.14
  Version table:
     1.6.16 400
        400 http://mirrors.nic.funet.fi/ubuntu bionic-proposed/main i386 Packages
 *** 1.6.14 500
        500 http://mirrors.nic.funet.fi/ubuntu bionic-updates/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.6.12ubuntu0.2 500
        500 http://mirrors.nic.funet.fi/ubuntu bionic-security/main i386 Packages
     1.6.1 500
        500 http://mirrors.nic.funet.fi/ubuntu bionic/main i386 Packages

$ grep '\^linux-image' /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove-kernels
   "^linux-image-5\.4\.0-122-generic$";
   "^linux-image-5\.4\.0-123-generic$";
   "^linux-image-extra-5\.4\.0-122-generic$";
   "^linux-image-extra-5\.4\.0-123-generic$";
   "^linux-image-unsigned-5\.4\.0-122-generic$";
   "^linux-image-unsigned-5\.4\.0-123-generic$";

$ uname -r
5.4.0-121-generic

$ dpkg -l linux-image-5.4.0-121-generic
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-=================================-=====================-=====================-=======================================================================
ii linux-image-5.4.0-121-generic 5.4.0-121.137~18.04.1 i386 Linux kernel image for version 5.4.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP

$ apt-cache rdepends --installed --recurse linux-image-5.4.0-121-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-121-generic
Reverse Depends:
 |linux-modules-extra-5.4.0-121-generic
linux-modules-extra-5.4.0-121-generic
Reverse Depends:

$ apt-mark showauto linux-image-5.4.0-121-generic linux-modules-extra-5.4.0-121-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-121-generic
linux-modules-extra-5.4.0-121-generic

$ sudo apt autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.