Re: unattended-upgrades by default

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2017 at 02:13:58PM +0100, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> Two months ago, Steve wrote:
> > * enable it for installation via d-i by default. At installation
> [it being unattended-upgrades]
> 
> What's the status of this? I do not like this idea, it interacts
> poorly with desktops which handle upgrades via PackageKit (which
> is the default) and since there are locking races in apt invoking
> dpkg, it's not really a safe thing to do anyway, causing issues
> like https://bugs.debian.org/850417
> 
> I'd really like to default this to disabled, and add a warning
> about how it interacts with other systems and that people should
> take care running apt manually when the unattended upgrades would
> run, as that can break things.

I don't like it either.

In addition to the reasons already explained, bandwidth is a precious
resource that should not become mostly unavailable at random times by
default.

A sudden drop in available bandwidth could be as inappropriate as an
anti-virus popping up. Imagine that happening during a presentation
in which you expect all bandwidth to be available.

If we want to be the Universal OS, we can't assume that any time
(not chosen by the user) is ok to do an upgrade.

Thanks.