Comment 3 for bug 779382

After an upgrade at the beginning of September, it appears that this same issue affects unity-2d. Prior to around September 2, unity-2d continued to show the update-notifier "updates available" icon on the panel.

This is a critical issue; although the default behavior of update-notifier is to spawn a window instead of to show the icon on the panel, many users (myself included) strongly prefer the in-panel notification to the auto-launching of update-manager and will as a result have overridden this default. (In fact, this was a sufficiently frequent question that the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release notes document for users how to override this behavior.) As a consequence, upon upgrade to oneiric these users will silently cease to receive notifications of updates, including security updates.

One of two things needs to happen here for release. Either the unity/unity-2d change that causes the update-notifier icon to no longer show up on the panel needs to be reverted (which IMHO would be preferred given that it respects the users' explicitly declared preference for receiving notifications), or update-notifier needs somehow to be able to detect that its panel icon isn't going to display, and fall back to auto-spawning the window in spite of the user preference.

I'm assigning this bug to the Ubuntu Desktop team since I have no idea what the rationale is for this most recent change in unity behavior and hopefully someone there does.