[Bug 1836328] Re: unattended-upgrades should not be enabled by default

[Balint Reczey]

Individual packages can be fixed to deal with being upgraded while their
executables are running. W3m for example keeps running fine and in my
past experience Firefox just told the user to restart it but kept
running.

There is automation in place to ensure restarting services relying in
shared libraries for software packaged in Ubuntu, but there is nut much
unattended-upgrades can do to help software surviving upgrades in case
the software is not packaged as a .deb.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1836328

Title:
  unattended-upgrades should not be enabled by default

Status in unattended-upgrades package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix
Status in unattended-upgrades package in Debian:
  Unknown

Bug description:
  The unattended-upgrades package and the whole concept of upgrading
  software automatically behind user's back is HARMFUL and the
  service/timer should NOT be enabled by default.

  It harms experience even for novice users with applications like
  Firefox preventing opening links until you restart it (which is
  terribad if you're in the middle of some work and don't want to do
  that at THAT particular moment!), and some other applications crashing
  in some cases, especially applications that run sub-processes
  interactively or on timers/cronjobs -- where updates to their libs or
  other dependencies create error states due to version/API/ABI
  mismatches.

  Please do not enable the service/timer by default and leave it to
  advanced users to enable assuming they understand the consequences.

  The same problem plagues snaps but that's a different bug report I
  suppose.

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