Ubuntu
unattended-upgrades package

  1. Bug #1624644
  2. Comment #27

Comment 27 for bug 1624644

Revision history for this message
Brian Murray (brian-murray) wrote : Re: By default settings unattended-upgrade is unable to automatically remove packages that become unused in conjunction with updating by other software.

The get_auto_removable function in unattended-ugprades just checks to see if the package has the "is_auto_removable" flag set. So setting "Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Dependencies" to "true" will produce the same outcome as using "sudo apt autoremove" e.g.:

bdmurray@clean-xenial-amd64:~$ sudo apt autoremove
[sudo] password for bdmurray:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libllvm3.8 libmircommon5 libsnapd-glib1 linux-headers-4.4.0-31 linux-headers-4.4.0-31-generic linux-image-4.4.0-31-generic
  linux-image-extra-4.4.0-31-generic snap-confine snapd-login-service ubuntu-core-launcher

bdmurray@clean-xenial-amd64:~$ sudo unattended-upgrade --dry-run
/usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 9 --force-depends --remove libllvm3.8:amd64 libmircommon5:amd64 snapd-login-service:amd64 libsnapd-glib1:amd64 linux-headers-4.4.0-31-generic:amd64 linux-headers-4.4.0-31:all linux-image-extra-4.4.0-31-generic:amd64 linux-image-4.4.0-31-generic:amd64 snap-confine:amd64 ubuntu-core-launcher:amd64
/usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 11 --configure --pending

So I think the question here is whether or not we think it is safe to run autoremovals without user interaction.