How to automatically apt-get?

[Mario Vukelic]

On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 12:05 -0400, Matt Morgan wrote:
> What problems have arisen in the recent past (I'm looking for
> examples) with unattended upgrades in Ubuntu? I have very successfully
> done unattended upgrades with other OSes in the past (but am new to
> Ubuntu).

It's totally fine to do security upgrades unattended. Ubuntu also has a
GUI config option in Software Sources.

> On Debian, for example, on servers at work I'd usually set up my
> sources.list to upgrade only from the security repos, so that I'd get
> security updates right away (important) but not feature changes
> (important to avoid on a server, usually). In 2+ years I never had
> serious trouble with automatically applying security updates in
> Debian.

Fine in Ubuntu too, as it works the same way as Debian

> Would you guys recommend doing the same thing (ie automatically
> upgrading from the security repos only) with Ubuntu, or not? 

Yes. I was not objecting to automatic security upgrades in my initial
reply (I even pointed out the setting), but I was objecting to using
"apt-get upgrade --force-yes", because this is something completely
different. It forces upgrades despite APT complaining about problems.
Automatic security upgrades would not do this.