Be informed before update

[Sylva1n]

I understood that one of the purpose of snapcraft is to ensure that the system is up-to-date without requiring any user action. That’s fine. But I would like the user to be informed a few moment about the next update (and the possible reboot).

How can I achieve this?

Thanks

[Ads20000]

@Sylva1n

and the possible reboot

There’s never a reboot for snap refreshes, as far as I’m aware.

[ogra]

@Sylva1n

I understood that one of the purpose of snapcraft is to ensure that the system is up-to-date without requiring any user action.

snapcraft is the tool to build snap packages … what keeps your snap packages up to date locally is snapd …

and @Ads20000 is correct, until we start providing kernels or bootloaders as snap packages, there are no reboots necessary, snaps on desktop/server installs are happily getting along without them.

PS: i have adjusted the category of this thread to snapd …

[Sylva1n]

Sorry for the misplaced category…

I have installed Ubuntu Core and after a few minutes, the system did reboot.

I thought it was related to snapd.

[ogra]

@Sylva1n

I have installed Ubuntu Core

Yeah, Ubuntu Core actually uses snap packages for the kernel and the rootfs, so there you actually get reboots for these two snaps. but it tells you that it will reboot on the console 30 seconds before it does so, it also gives instructions how to stop the reboot process in case you still have files open in an editor etc.

You can also schedule updates in general so they do not come as a surprise:

Refresh-schedule via core config

The new snapd 2.25 has a new feature to set the refresh schedule within a 24h window. This allows to say that you want updates only between 4:00-7:00 in the morning for example or between 4:00-7:00 and 19:00-22:00. The syntax is: $ sudo snap set core refresh.schedule=4:00-7:00/19:00-21:00 Note that a refresh may happen outside of this window if your last refresh is too old, in this case snapd will refresh even outside the scheduled windows.

[Sylva1n]

So I can imagine that a snap could read the list of the available updates every minute and warn the user before the scheduled window.
What is the best way to retrieve this update snap list?

[Ads20000]

You might have to write a script that does that. Set the refresh frequency to what you want it to be, then you’ll need to write a script that runs snap list then snap info foo on all of your snaps and analyses the difference between the installed revision and the revision in the channel that each app is tracking and then report all the differences. You’ll need to set the script to run before the snaps are scheduled to refresh. You’ll then probably have to hunt down the changelogs for each update online.

[Sylva1n]

Is snapd-control interface required to perform such a task?

[ogra]

Technically yes, practically it means that you need a brand store since uploading snap packages using snapd-control to the global store is not permitted by policy.