[Bug 1886161] [NEW] UU is almost useless on itinerant laptops

[Robin]

Public bug reported:

For many if not most laptop computers, Unattended Upgrades seems all but
useless by design.

For upgrades to happen, with default config, 3 conditions must be met:

- an internet connection must be up and running when the timer or cron or anacron tries the unattended upgrade
- the connection must not be metered, whatever that means (Skip-Updates-On-Metered-Connections "true")
- the computer must be plugged in (OnlyOnACPower "true")

These are insurmountable problems for many laptops on the go.
Inevitably, security upgrades will almost never run unattended on such
computers. I discovered with shock that Unattended Upgrades had almost
never run on my laptop. I tried all possible config tweaks. Nothing
worked reliably and in the end I gave up and wrote a upgrade script
which uses Network Manager's connection-up hook. Unattended Upgrades
needs to do something like this out of the box. Users should not need to
write scripts to ensure security upgrades.

Unattended upgrades is an excellent project for servers. But it really
needs to work, out of the box, on laptops too.

** Affects: unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1886161

Title:
  UU is almost useless on itinerant laptops

Status in unattended-upgrades package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  For many if not most laptop computers, Unattended Upgrades seems all
  but useless by design.

  For upgrades to happen, with default config, 3 conditions must be met:

  - an internet connection must be up and running when the timer or cron or anacron tries the unattended upgrade
  - the connection must not be metered, whatever that means (Skip-Updates-On-Metered-Connections "true")
  - the computer must be plugged in (OnlyOnACPower "true")

  These are insurmountable problems for many laptops on the go.
  Inevitably, security upgrades will almost never run unattended on such
  computers. I discovered with shock that Unattended Upgrades had almost
  never run on my laptop. I tried all possible config tweaks. Nothing
  worked reliably and in the end I gave up and wrote a upgrade script
  which uses Network Manager's connection-up hook. Unattended Upgrades
  needs to do something like this out of the box. Users should not need
  to write scripts to ensure security upgrades.

  Unattended upgrades is an excellent project for servers. But it really
  needs to work, out of the box, on laptops too.

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