Public bug reported:
On all my Trusty installations, if the settings for "when there are
updates" in the update-manager GUI are set to "Display immediately"
rather than "Download and install automatically", then any newly
installed packages are not marked as automatically installed, preventing
the removal of old kernels (by e.g. "apt-get autoremove").
I usually have "Display immediately" set, so I can see what security
updates are going by. This leads to my systems silting up with old
kernels; I manually uninstall them occasionally. I was expecting them to
be automatically managed.
The relevant kernel packages do not show up in "apt-mark showauto"; I
think this is the problem. I think the machinery for keeping selected
kernels (visible in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove-kernels) is working
fine and is not the source of the problem.
I confirmed my diagnosis by temporarily setting my netbook to "Download
and install automatically" and waiting for a kernel security update. The
newly installed kernel packages (3.13.0-63) showed up in "apt-mark
showauto". I left my desktop machine at "Display immediately", and the
same kernel does not appear in "apt-mark showauto", as usual.
I'm guessing the issue is that if the user is given the opportunity to
manually choose whether packages are installed, then just leaving the
checkboxes checked is treated as an explicit manual installation. Or
something like that.
(This might be a duplicate of bug #1439769. However, I wasn't sure, as
(a) that bug doesn't mention the UI configuration as being significant,
(b) only mentions Vivid, so maybe it's a different/worse problem. Thanks
to Colin Watson for explaining to me how the kernel autoremoval
machinery works.)
update-manager version: 1:0.196.13 on Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS
(as far as I recall, this has been the behaviour ever since I upgraded to
Trusty)
** Affects: update-manager (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1492709
Title:
New packages (e.g. kernels) not marked for autoremove iff update-
manager set to "display" rather than "install automatically"
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