First I've heard of this, and as a long-time Debian user it initially sounded like yet another oddity peculiar to Ubuntu. It sounds like this problem shouldn't

First I've heard of this, and as a long-time Debian user it initially sounded like yet another oddity peculiar to Ubuntu. It sounds like this problem shouldn't / wouldn't affect most 'business' servers iff you were running the LTS (stable) branch, as security updates aren't phased (as per TFA's comment). LTS Ubuntu, AIUI, is similar to Debian stable -- it only receives security patches, not new (feature) versions of any packages. Reviewing apt & apt-get man pages here (I'm on 2.5.4) I see no references to 'phase'. Reviewing Debian's changelog.gz I see the first phase reference in 2.5.1 (2022-07), and a subsequent reference in 2.5.3 (2022-09) - but nothing about 'phased updates' on the Debian wiki, and per Ubuntu's discourse[0] phased updates were first introduced to apt in version 2.1.16 - so I'm guessing it took a while for those to be fed upstream (to Debian - assuming they are still considered upstream for - dare I say it, the canonical owners of - apt/apt-get). There's an askubuntu [1] post describing the what & why behind this change, and it sells the reader on the 'improved stability' claim, while downplaying TFA's concerns (potential random inconsistency), while acknowledging poor defaults, tooling, and documentation. It does feel a bit of an odd solution to me - Debian provides a testing branch which seems to serve this function - some relatively small subset of users will use testing and find your bugs for you. If you seek safety & predictability then you stick with the stable / LTS branch. In contrast, randomly selecting some subset of your users - with Ubuntu's typical opt-out default - to randomly get an early / deferred updating of some random subset of your installed packages just seems ... well, I can see why TFA was frustrated. [0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/phased-updates-in-apt-in-21-04/20345 https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/phased-updates-in-apt-in-21-0... [1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1431940/what-are-phased-updates-and-why-does-ubuntu-use-them https://askubuntu.com/questions/1431940/what-are-phased-upda...