14.04 LTS: inaccurate reports of packages available at login

[Nikhil Nair]

Hi,

I switched from Ubuntu server 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS fairly recently.  One
very odd change in behaviour I've noticed is that, when the number of
packages available for upgrade (and the number which are security upgrades)
are reported at login time, they're often quite outdated.  This wasn't the
case under 12.04 LTS.

Just now, the report said there was 1 package available; when I ran "sudo
apt-get dist-upgrade", it turned out there were 7.  I'm sure there have
been cases when it reported there were none, so I didn't try, but, in fact,
there were (some of which may have been security updates...).

On the other hand, on other occasions after upgrading, I've logged out and
logged back in perhaps 20 minutes later, and the number of available
packages had increased; but, when I did another apt-get dist-upgrade, there
were none.

I presume some sort of caching was done to save too-frequent checks of the
database, or, perhaps, to speed up the login process.  However, this
definitely looks like a bug to me!

What's the way forward - will someone pick it up from here, or do I need to
lodge a bug report?  If the latter, how does that work - if I have to
associate the report with a particular package, which package would I
choose here?  (Sorry, not familiar with the Ubuntu bug reporting system;
any pointers to the appropriate documentation would be appreciated.)

Cheers,

Nikhil.