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Disable apt-listchanges (and other interactive stuff) during upgrades (reliably)

Why is it so difficult to achieve non-interactivity with apt, an otherwise excellent program, given that the Unix philosophy aspires to it?

I am hoping the changes I made to /etc/apt/listchanges.conf will help, but I want suggestions as to how to reliably do upgrades without any interaction whatsoever.

[apt]

frontend=none

email_address=root

confirm=0

save_seen=/var/lib/apt/listchanges.db

which=news


This is the command I used was

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \

apt-get \

-o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" \

--force-yes \

-fuy \

dist-upgrade


I also added the following lines to /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg
force-confold

force-confdef
upgrade apt
by

1 Answer

Bharatgxwzm
As you found and set in your config, apt-listchanges should not prompt if you set the frontend to none. You can also set the environment variable APT_LISTCHANGES_FRONTEND=none to achieve the same thing.

It sounds like what you really want to do is use the unattended-upgrades package. It handles everything for you: disabling apt-listchanges, setting the frontend to noninteractive, checking for and avoiding conffile prompts, etc. If nothing else, the contents of the Python script /usr/bin/unattended-upgrades

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