Software Updater does not respect user's "Automatically check for updates" setting

[Mark]

I'm using Lubuntu 12.10, installed in a VirtualBox VM.

Software Updater checks for updates whenever it is run. There doesn't seem to be any way to prevent that, short of manually interrupting the check every time. Even if the user clicks Settings... and sets "Automatically check for updates" to Never, Software Updater always checks for updates.

This can cause a lot of unnecessary network activity. Apart from wasting time when there is no need to check for updates, imagine the impact on the user experience for users with dialup or pay-by-the-megabyte 3G connections.

This could be improved in a couple of ways:
 1. Respect the user's choice and don't automatically check for updates every time Software Updater is run.
 2. If updates were last checked for recently (within 24 hours say), there's no need for Software Updater to re-download all the package lists. Examples:
   - The user used Software Updater to install security updates, and later runs it again to install some proposed updates.
   - The user used Synaptic to add a repository, reloaded the package lists and installed a package from the new repository. User later runs Software Updater.

(Ideally the whole package/update system would be improved so Software Updater could request from the server a list of those changed packages since the last check time. That would make a typical update checking session much faster. But I guess that's out of scope for this bug.)

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I don't follow the "respect the user's choice" logic. If someone launches Software Updater, 99% of the time it's because they want to install updates, which entails having an up-to-date list of updates. So checking automatically is just doing the obvious thing, and it's reasonable for that to be opt-out (using the "Stop" button) rather than opt-in (using a "Check For Updates"" button).

But if we can define a case where we know the automatic check isn't necessary, then sure, we shouldn't do the check. Perhaps something like, if the package lists have been updated in the past 24 hours AND more recently than the most recent change to the sources lists?

I've added your idea about listing packages updated since the last check time to <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareUpdates#Ideas>.

[Mark (mark-k)]

If the user has set "Automatically check for updates" to Never, then I think that should be respected. "Opting-out" using the Stop button isn't ideal because the user could be charged for data downloaded before they were able to click the button.

I think it would be better in the user-said-never-check-automatically case to show a message saying how long ago the last check was, and asking whether to check for updates. (So basically behave like Update Manager in older Ubuntu releases, except tell the user how long ago the last check was.)