Dependency on package unattended-upgrades on Ubuntu Server

Marked the affected package

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

same problem here... (oneiric)

I have noticed the same problem on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise). In that release, the package is named python-software-properties. It is not clear to me why there is a "hard" dependency here. When forced to install without unattended-upgrades, add-apt-repository works without a hitch. Perhaps a better choice would be a "suggest" or "recommend" dependency, or none at all.

This affects me too; we had some servers end up with a full boot partition because kernels got installed after we added python-software-properties on 12.04 to configure PPAs.

I don't see what this software has to do with unattended upgrades. We should remove the dependency IMHO.

Do the maintainers agree?

The same problem exists on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty). In this case, add-apt-repository is in package software-properties-common, which depends on python3-software-properties, which depends (needlessly) on unattended-upgrades.

Now that unattended-upgrades defaults to installing security updates in Xenial, I think this needs more attention. In mitigation, one can disable unattended-upgrades without removing the package (dpkg-reconfigure may work, but certainly hitting the files in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d will) but I understand that one can get more confidence by just purging a package that provides unwanted functionality.

Unless there's a good reason that unattended-upgrades must be a dependency. Can it be a Recommends instead, or perhaps be seeded as a Recommends directly?

I agree, would be nice if unattended-upgrades could be removed, without affecting anything else.

Patch attached.

09:20 <mvo> rbasak: I htink we can drop this dependency, we just need to make sure that the GUI does not offer to set "auto-install-security-updates"

We agreed that dropping the dependency should be fine once the GUI is checked/fixed, and then we can seed (recommend) unattended-upgrades from seeds as needed.

@racb, who's going to fix the GUI?

This bug was fixed in the package software-properties - 0.96.20

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software-properties (0.96.20) xenial; urgency=medium

  * Add missing pyflakes3 test dependency (got split out recently).

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Tue, 22 Mar 2016 08:45:29 +0100