Services restarted by unattended upgrades because of /etc/needrestart/restart.d/systemd-manager

[Simon Chopin]

On jeu. 06 juin 2024 03:28:17, Wiebe Cazemier wrote:
> Hi Simon,
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Simon Chopin" <simon.chopin at canonical.com>
> > To: "Wiebe Cazemier" <wiebe at halfgaar.net>
> > Cc: ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
> > Sent: Wednesday, 5 June, 2024 22:46:55
> > Subject: Re: Services restarted by unattended upgrades because of /etc/needrestart/restart.d/systemd-manager
> >
> >>
> >> I did not have "$nrconf{restart} = 'i'" uncommented. But when I do this
> >>
> >> > # cat /etc/needrestart/conf.d/disable-restart.conf
> >> > $nrconf{restart} = 'l';
> >>
> >> and reinstall libssl (apt reinstall libssl3t64), it still restarts everything,
> >> without asking. Was that the proper way to disable it that warrants a bug
> >> report?
> >
> > That's not the documented way to disable it, but yes I agree with you
> > that from a user's perspective it should have that effect. However, I
> > enjoin you to actually read the documentation I linked to, since it also
> > explains how to selectively disable restarts for specific services while
> > still retaining the default behaviour for the rest of the system.
>
> Alright, I submitted the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/needrestart/+bug/2068543
>
> I hope it reflects the issue well.

Thanks for this :)

> Meanwhile, I took the relevant action for the servers in question to disable it.
>
> BTW: the '-m u' is passed to /usr/sbin/needrestart, which does not document the option in --help. It seems to be patched in, because upstream at https://github.com/liske/needrestart does not have it.

Yes, it is part of our delta to be able to have the exact behaviour we
want when invoking needrestart as part of the APT hook. Since its
purpose is only in that context (and we had a lot going on) I didn't
think documenting it in the man page was necessary, but I was viewing
this from a perspective of someone understanding how it works, not
someone investigating the behaviour. I opened a bug to track this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/needrestart/+bug/2068573

Thanks for bringing these up!

Cheers,
Simon