I have to admit, I really really hate apt-listchanges. If I'm going to do a huge dist-upgrade, I want to just leave the computer there for a few hours. The asker of this serverfault question had a similar goal in mind, bu after implementing all of the suggestions in that post, I was still hit by apt-listchanges.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=noneemail_address=rootconfirm=0save_seen=/var/lib/apt/listchanges.dbwhich=newsThis is the command I used wasDEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \apt-get \-o Dpkg::Options::=--force-confnew \--force-yes \-fuy \dist-upgradeI also added the following lines to /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfgforce-confoldforce-confdef
disable apt-listchanges (and other interactive stuff) during upgrades (reliably)
apt;upgrade
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 should answer your questions about how it does its magic.