apt only. It is a Debian and Ubuntu package — dnf's equivalent is dnf-automatic
and pacman has no equivalent at all — so it is not a name to translate across the
other lists.
Installing the package is not by itself enough to switch it on. The apt-daily
timers read /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades, and on this host no package owns
that file: `dpkg -S` says it came from nothing, which means the original script
wrote it. So the section checks for it and offers to write it, rather than
assuming the install did.
Beyond that it only reports, because the interesting facts about unattended
upgrades are not whether it installed:
It never reboots on its own, deliberately. A kernel or libc update is installed
and then not used, and the machine keeps running the old one until it restarts.
Nothing announces that except /var/run/reboot-required, which nobody reads. The
section prints it, names the packages waiting, and puts it in the summary — it
is the failure people do not notice for months.
Ubuntu's Allowed-Origins includes plain ${distro_codename} as well as
-security, so this takes ordinary updates too, not only security ones.
Verified both paths: this host reports enabled with no reboot pending, and
pointing AUTO_UPGRADES at a temp file exercises the enable path and writes the
three periodic settings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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