On 29 May 2023 at 2:47 PM +0100, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, wrote:

From: Jimmy Yuen Ho Wong <wyuenho@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 29 May 2023 01:51:11 +0100
Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, 63563@debbugs.gnu.org

Is this new behavior no one asked for configurable? Over the many years I've been using package.el,
I've built in muscle memory. After M-x list-packages, when the packages buffer is done refreshing, I
immediately press U and x without looking. With the new behavior, when there's no upgrades, I'd be
installing the first package at point. Doing that a couple of times will mean I'll have a couple of extra
packages I don't want installed.

It turns out this behavior is new in Emacs 29, see bug#40457 and NEWS.
Since the new behavior is incompatible with the old one, I have now
added a new user option, package-menu-use-current-if-no-marks, to get
back the old behavior, and mentioned it in NEWS. You can now
customize that option to a nil value to get what you want.