Managing updates

[rpjday]

Apparently, refresh.metered requires Network Manager; that should be mentioned. Can you confirm that?

[ogra]

Since metered only applies to mobile connections (which netplan can not handle) isn’t that impled?

[rpjday]

Sure, but it never hurts to be explicit so there is no misunderstanding.

[nteodosio]

Is refresh.retain still working? I have it set to 2, but I have eight Firefox ones:

-rw------- 1 root root 244M jun  1  2023 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_2741.snap
-rw------- 1 root root 245M jun  8 10:52 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_2744.snap
-rw------- 1 root root 245M jun 20 18:29 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_2800.snap
-rw------- 2 root root 238M ago 24 13:30 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_3055.snap
-rw------- 1 root root 240M out  9 14:19 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_3230.snap
-rw------- 1 root root 239M out 11 17:31 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_3252.snap
-rw------- 1 root root 241M nov  8 13:38 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_3358.snap
-rw------- 1 root root 246M nov 21 08:38 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_3416.snap

[ogra]

See:

/var/lib/snapd/snaps retains huge amounts of data

I’ve been struggling with a full hard drive for a few years; blaming my use of nodejs/git etc. I’ve set refresh.retain to 2 and manually copied and checked a script from https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/04/how-to-remove-old-snap-versions-to-free.html so that I can run it when my filesystem is full. Finally I’ve figured out today that /var/lib/snapd/snaps still holds many older versions of downloaded snaps. I run du -h -x --max-depth=6 -t 1100000000 regularly and write it’s output to a timest…

Might be an issue with the refresh app awareness…

[awe]

We may want to add a note that mentions that there’s a practical limit to how frequently snapd can be instructed to check for updates. One of my colleague’s recently tried to set refresh.timer=00:00~23:59/1440 (i.e. check once per minute), and was puzzled why this didn’t work.

We discussed this today in our field+snapd meeting and the reason this fails is due to the following:

auto-refreshes are run from the ensure loop which in steady state happens every 5 minutes, also there is a check not to refresh again for at least 20 mins

It might be a good idea to add a note to the documentation that mentions the practical lower bound…

[degville]

Thanks so much for this information. I’ve added the lower bound information to the document.