[Ubuntu] `man-db` automatic updates will be disabled on November 10th

[erik-bershel]

Breaking changes

Automatic updates for the man-db will be disabled. The changes will affect all Ubuntu-based images.

Target date

Image deployment will start on November 10th, 2025 and will take about 4 days.

The motivation for the changes

Automatic man-db updates have become too time-consuming, which negatively impacts the speed of tool installation and updates.
Original issue: #10977

Possible impact

Disabling man-db auto updates may negatively affect mechanisms related to its operation, such as the whatis command, and may also affect processes related to work with packages documentation.

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 24.04
• macOS 13
• macOS 13 Arm64
• macOS 14
• macOS 14 Arm64
• macOS 15
• macOS 15 Arm64
• macOS 26 Arm64
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022
• Windows Server 2025

Mitigation ways

If you encounter any issues in your workflows that are clearly caused by this change, you can take one of the following steps to resolve these issues, at your discretion:

• Use mandb -fq to manually update the index once right before running the affected command/step
• Or, use echo "set man-db/auto-update true" | debconf-communicate && dpkg-reconfigure man-db at the very beginning of the run to revert the changes and restore the old behavior