Hi, This may not address very old releases but for the future releases, your concern may be addressed for END USER by adding few features to unattended-upgrades which seems to be default for stable default install.
Currently, unattended-upgrades checks number of packages kept back and report to MOTD. For such END USER, if there is a 404 error condition flag file (3 consecutive errors? to turn on flag) by unattended-upgrades, it should not be too difficult to add that report to MOTD. > /usr/share/unattended-upgrades/update-motd-unattended-upgrades As for more GUI type environment, currently GNOME Package program generates pop up via GNOME notification service (?)when packages are ready to be installed. The same code may be modified to pop up message for failed fetching of apt HTTP connection while network is active. What do you think of reassigning this bug to unattended-upgrades ? Osamu
