[Bug 1820888] Re: unattended-upgrades may hold back upgrades due to comparing package versions by their string representation

[Brian Murray]

Hello Balint, or anyone else affected,

Accepted unattended-upgrades into cosmic-proposed. The package will
build now and be available at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source
/unattended-upgrades/1.5ubuntu3.18.10.3 in a few hours, and then in the
-proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package.  See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation on how
to enable and use -proposed.  Your feedback will aid us getting this
update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please add a comment to this bug,
mentioning the version of the package you tested and change the tag from
verification-needed-cosmic to verification-done-cosmic. If it does not
fix the bug for you, please add a comment stating that, and change the
tag to verification-failed-cosmic. In either case, without details of
your testing we will not be able to proceed.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification .  Thank you in
advance for helping!

N.B. The updated package will be released to -updates after the bug(s)
fixed by this package have been verified and the package has been in
-proposed for a minimum of 7 days.

** Changed in: unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu Cosmic)
       Status: New => Fix Committed

** Tags added: verification-needed verification-needed-cosmic

** Changed in: unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu Bionic)
       Status: New => Fix Committed

** Tags added: verification-needed-bionic

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1820888

Title:
  unattended-upgrades may hold back upgrades due to comparing package
  versions by their string representation

Status in unattended-upgrades package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in unattended-upgrades source package in Bionic:
  Fix Committed
Status in unattended-upgrades source package in Cosmic:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  [Impact]

   * Without the fix u-u could not upgrade particular packages from -security. It could be observed in Cosmic with systemd security updates failing to install partly due to 239-7ubuntu10.10 being smaller than 239-7ubuntu10.8 when comparing them as strings:
  https://objectstorage.prodstack4-5.canonical.com/v1/AUTH_77e2ada1e7a84929a74ba3b87153c0ac/autopkgtest-disco/disco/amd64/u/unattended-upgrades/20190318_182031_fe4fe@/log.gz

  [Test Case]

   * The fix includes the extension of the build-time test cases to
  cover package sets with which u-u fails with without the fallback:

  ...
  Running ./test_rewind.py with python3
  DEBUG:root:APT::VersionedKernelPackages is not set
  DEBUG:root:adjusting candidate version: test-package=2.0
  ...

  With the unfixed version the test case fails here because u-u tries to
  upgrade test-package to version 12.0 because it does not find version
  2.0 smaller.

  [Regression Potential]

  * The change is very small and isolated, but fixing it revealed the
  issue fixed in LP: #1821101. Since the found issue's fix introduces
  fallbacks when apt's resolver can't find a the solution it is unlikely
  that other failures are triggered by the fix.

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