Reduce cron spam from weekly update-notifier-common

I think part of the point of having the cronjob is to mail the system administrator and let them know that a new release of Ubuntu is available. That being said I do feel like sending the email every week until the system upgraded is a bit much. I'd be happy to hear about any clever ideas for avoiding that.

On Thu, Sep 02, 2021 at 05:39:23PM -0000, Brian Murray wrote:
> I think part of the point of having the cronjob is to mail the system
> administrator and let them know that a new release of Ubuntu is
> available. That being said I do feel like sending the email every week
> until the system upgraded is a bit much. I'd be happy to hear about any
> clever ideas for avoiding that.

Maybe email once per new release of Ubuntu (including point
releases). Create a flag on disk when notifed for said release.

If we wanted to, create the flag on /run, so that a reboot resets it
all.

Unfortunately, this is made worse with the shift to replacing services
with juju deployments where environments contain multiple units each
trying to email about a new release.

Thanks!

One method that wouldn't require fs storage would be to only notify for a certain number of days post-release (as limited by something like ubuntu-distro-info --stable --days=release > -30) which would (on the currently weekly schedule) limit a release to sending 4-5 emails?

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that specific release.