How do I stop display and another email of changes when running aptitude full-upgrade after receiving apticron email notifying of the same changes?

Question

My home server used to run Ubuntu 10.10 server with apticron installed, which periodically (via cron) sends emails when updates to your installed packages are available. This email includes a list of the changes in the packages thanks to apticron's dependency on apt-listchanges.

I recently rebuilt the server from scratch after a hard disk failure, this time using Ubuntu 11.04 server but with this newer Ubuntu, when I receive one of the apticron "Updates available" emails and log into the server to run aptitude full-upgrade to install said updates, aptitude displays the same list of changes and requires me to quit the pager before it will install the updates. It also sends me another email with the same list of updates in it again. This change in default behaviour from 10.10 to 11.04 is starting to irritate me. How do I turn off the "display changes when upgrading" feature?

I've tried uninstalling apt-listchanges which does prevent the changes being shown when doing the aptitude full-upgrade, but unfortunately stops the list of changes from being shown in the apticron emails, which I want to keep.

Answer 1

Of course, I should have read the manpage. On Ubuntu 11.04, /etc/apt/listchanges.conf looks like this:

[apt]
frontend=pager
email_address=root
confirm=0
save_seen=/var/lib/apt/listchanges.db
which=news

So I changed frontend to text and removed email_address to give this

[apt]
frontend=text
confirm=0
save_seen=/var/lib/apt/listchanges.db
which=news

which means the changes are not emailed to me when running aptitude full-upgrade and although they are still output to the terminal, they just whiz by without requiring me to quit the pager.

Curiously, on another server where I still have Ubuntu 10.10, I see that this configuration file is exactly the same as the first version above. But apparently this doesn't work properly in Ubuntu 10.10 as I've never seen the changes again or received the additional email when performing upgrades on this server.