About "holding" automatic refreshes

snapd
1

Hi,

I am using the snap refresh --hold command so that all updates are held forever, since one of the snaps I’m using is active all the time and I don’t want it to get updated while it’s running. I am using snap refresh in order to update all the snaps manually whenever I close the aforementioned snap.

Is the --hold parameter maintained after a snap refresh command is issued or is it cancelled and a new snap refresh --hold command has to be given after every manual update so that the automatic updates are held again?

Thank you.

2

The hold setting is persistent in the state. You can confirm that with:

sudo cat /var/lib/snapd/state.json| jq .data.config.core
3

@mborzecki1

I had accepted your response as the solution but it seems snapd does not actually hold the refreshes with the snap refresh --hold command.

This is what the system returned when I issued the cat command as root:

TurboX:~ # cat /var/lib/snapd/state.json| jq .data.config.core
{
  "refresh": {
    "hold": "forever"
  },
  "seed": {
    "loaded": true
  }
}
TurboX:~ #

This is what appeared in the journal log the same day without me issuing the snap refresh command:

May 18 20:44:53 TurboX snapd[1278]: storehelpers.go:916: cannot refresh: snap has no updates available: "bare", "core18", "core20", "gnome-3-28-1804", "gtk-common-themes", "snapd", "surfshark"

Obviously snapd did check for updates automatically.

Is there any other way to actually disable the automatic refreshes?

Thank you.

P.S. The system is openSUSE Tumbleweed if this helps.

4

I’m not quite sure what evidence you are basing that conclusion on. Yes, the code will hold refreshes, see for yourself snapd/overlord/snapstate/autorefresh.go at 72c072d29ea524ac0c94be3fc10c7a4d2486673a · canonical/snapd · GitHub

The log you mention shows up if you run snap refresh manually.

5

@mborzecki1

The log entry appeared by itself. I hadn’t run snap refresh manually.

On another system that’s running Xubuntu 22.04, I see those log entries appearing regularly automatically. I haven’t used snap refresh --hold on that one though. I think the same log entry is used for both the automatic and the manual updates.