Not getting notified of updates?

[dankegel]

My Jaunty machines hardly ever prompt me to install any
updates, even though I know Chrome is updated weekly.
After glaring at them for days, it dawned on me that
update-notifier has a bug: when no security updates are
waiting, it won't launch update-manager unless it's been
a week since you last installed something.
The way it tells you've installed something is by checking
the date on /var/log/dpkg.log.
But since logs are rotated weekly, that means it almost
never hits a week before that file is touched again,
and so it never launches update manager!

Anyone feel like verifying this theory?

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/356152

I wrote a little perl script that prints out why
update-notifier isn't launching update-manager; it's at
http://kegel.com/linux/ubuntu-autoup...gnostic-pl.txt
This is what led me to figure out what was going on.

[QIII]

It's a "feature". Don't know why anyone thought it was a good idea.

I don't remember where I found it, but I used the work around.

If someone doesn't get back to you, I'll see if I can find you a URL.

[dankegel]

It's a "feature".

No, I understand what they intended: that you
not be bothered with noncritical updates for a week
after you last ran update-manager or apt-get install manually.

But it's not working as they intended! They expect
it to show you noncritical updates after a week
of inactivity, but because the log rotation looks
like activity to update-notifier, it *never* shows
noncritical updates. That was not their intent when
they made the change.

Sigh. Maybe I'll have to become a MOTU and upload a fix myself...

[oldfred]

When I saw this when I upgraded, I happened across a setting that changed it back. Mine works like always with a icon in the tool bar when ever any update is available. I had to look in google to find the setting again.
This site has the setting. http://maketecheasier.com/remove-the...nty/2009/06/18
You use gconf-editor in terminal and Navigate to Apps->Update Notifier and uncheck the auto launch box. Seems backwards to me but it works.

[dankegel]

I don't want the old behavior back. I want the new behavior
to work as designed. I don't care about my computer; I'm
worried about the 99% of Ubuntu users who are using
the default settings. They should get notified of nonsecurity
updates after no more than a week, as the update-notifier
author intended, and this bug makes them wait longer.

[dankegel]

They expect
it to show you noncritical updates after a week
of inactivity, but because the log rotation looks
like activity to update-notifier, it *never* shows
noncritical updates.

Correction: the dpkg.log and apt/term.log files are
rotated monthly, so this bug only causes an extra
week of no updates. Now I think in the average month,
in the absence of security updates, users will get
prompted to install nonsecurity updates three times instead
of four as a result of this particular bug.

So, it's only 1/4 as awful as I thought. Still worth
fixing.