newly installed additional units are not started on upgrade

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

Upon upgrading apt from a version that only ships apt-daily.timer to the one that ships apt-daily.timer and apt-daily-upgrade.timer, the latter is not started on zesty and later.

I believe this may be a bug in dh_systemd_start:

# Automatically added by dh_systemd_start
if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
 systemctl --system daemon-reload >/dev/null || true
 if [ -n "$2" ]; then
  _dh_action=try-restart
 else
  _dh_action=start
 fi
 deb-systemd-invoke $_dh_action apt-daily-upgrade.timer apt-daily.timer >/dev/null || true
fi
# End automatically added section

This reduces to:
deb-systemd-invoke try-restart apt-daily-upgrade.timer apt-daily.timer >/dev/null || true

which is (after calling/checking policy-rc.d) is:
systemctl try-restart apt-daily-upgrade.timer apt-daily.timer >/dev/null || true

This is correct, for the apt-daily.timer and does nothing for the apt-daily-upgrade.timer. Since apt-daily-upgrade.timer is not active, try-restart does not start it.

Imho, there should be an extra snippet in apt.postinst which does this:

if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
 if dpkg --compare $2 with version that introduces apt-daily-upgrade.timer; then
         deb-systemd-invoke start apt-daily-upgrade.timer >/dev/null || true
 fi
fi

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Or as per adam. If the deb-systemd-invoke tracks magic state at install time, and knows which units are brand new, it should do start on those, and retry-start on the known updated units.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package debhelper - 10.10.9ubuntu1

---------------
debhelper (10.10.9ubuntu1) bionic; urgency=medium

  * Merge from current Debian unstable. Remaining changes:
    - Generate ddebs from debhelper instead of pkg-create-dbgsym
      + Make debhelper Conflict/Replace pkg-create-dbgsym to force it off.
      + Set DBGSYM_PACKAGE_TYPE to ddeb to get correct debian/files output.
    - dh_installchangelogs: Do not install upstream changelog in compat
      level 7 and higher to avoid pointlessly bloating installed packages.

debhelper (10.10.9) unstable; urgency=medium

  [ Dmitry Shachnev ]
  * qmake.pm: Add missing import of generated_file.
  * meson.pm: Find typo of meson in the name of the cross config
    file.
  * qmake.pm: Push compiler information as ‘early’ flags to qmake, to
    make sure qmake calls the right compiler to get library paths.
  * qmake.pm: Add all possible settings to generated qmake-cross.conf.
    Now output of ‘qmake -query’ with and without using this file is
    identical. This makes cross-building Qt’s own modules possible.

  [ Niels Thykier ]
  * dh_missing: Permit a missing debian/tmp without failing in
    compat 11 when debian/tmp is an implicit source directory.
    Thanks to Christoph Biedl for reporting the bug.
    (Closes: #882083)
  * dh_missing: Improve the wording about "debian/not-installed".

 -- Adam Conrad <email address hidden> Tue, 21 Nov 2017 14:26:40 -0700