Phase out the auto-updater on -workstation in favor of unattended upgrades

[jdreed]

The auto-updater is getting more and more complex, and as it does so, the intersection of the sets {what -workstation wants} and {what -cluster wants} is also getting smaller. Ubuntu provides a  native method for automatic upgrades. We should use it.

[jdreed]

This looks pretty simple, actually. unattended-upgrades is already installed (it's an eventual dependency of ubuntu-desktop), but by default it doesn't run unless you run it periodically with cron. Configuration for Debathena is as simple as editing /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades to include something like:

// Automatically upgrade packages from these (origin, archive) pairs
Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins {
        "Ubuntu lucid-security";
        "Debathena lucid";
        "Debathena lucid-development";
        "Debathena lucid-proposed";
//      "Ubuntu lucid-updates";
};

Things to do:

• Generate 50unattended-upgrades using Hesiod clusterinfo
• See what it does with conffile conflicts (and UCF conflicts)
• Make a config package

I assert that we want to stick with our auto-updater on cluster (which can be made a lot simpler once we no longer have to deal with workstation stuff), but use this on -workstation. There will remain the challenge of how to put unattended-upgrade-config on workstation, but not on -cluster. It's possible that cluster no longer wants to be a superset of workstation.

[jdreed]

Evan reminds us:

You probably want a mechanism to keep it from uninstalling metapackages

[kaduk]

Some of the current auto-updater stuff (e.g. recovery hook) might be wrapped into a cluster workstation verification script?