Hi everyone,
I was used to receive notifications about Firefox snap upgrades quite often, but now it has been a while since the last notification appeared.
The Firefox version currently installed in my system is the 153.0.3
Is this the last version I am supposed to have or for some reason snap does not update Firefox anymore?
If something is broken, is there anything I can do to restore the automatic upgrades?
Yes, I know they should update automatically, but in my case they did not do it.
I suppose all I have to do is wait and see what happens with the next update.
They won’t update while the app is open – I for one rarely close Firefox. I get notifications asking me to close Firefox, and then once I do the update happens and it says I can reopen it.
Yes, you are right, it behaves like you said: the notification asks to close Firefox in order to proceed with the update. Once the update is finished it informs you that Firefox can be reopened. I also keep Firefox always running and I I am not receiving those notifications for some time, since version 153.0.3.
No, it has nothing to do with apt updates and notifications. It’s a reported issue on the snapcraft.io forum and some related bugs on launchpad.
When doing a manual refresh, the snap-store server reports available updates for snaps. However, when a scheduled auto-refresh check occurs and snapd queries the snap-store server for available updates, the snap-store server returns no updates available for any snaps, including the ones that were manually confirmed to have updates.
I initially thought it might be related to progressive rollouts (basically phasing for snaps), but I don’t think there’s a way to tell from the client-side if that’s the case.
I wouldn’t think using progressive rollouts for web browsers would be good idea anyway since often updates contain security fixes including serious or critical ones. Publishers would want those to get out to all their user base as quickly as possible.
Auto-refresh still works for some of my installed snaps, but not others.
What if such a CVE fix ships with a cookie monster bug that eats all your cookies? Wouldn’t you prefer that only a small fraction of users gets it first (and reports it) to be able to hold the update for the other few millions of users?
(Along with the QA argument it also prevents a “planned DOS” when millions of machines want the update at the same time, even though snaps always do delta updates under the hood and not a lot data is actually transferred, it can still be a huge amount of server requests)
Are you confirming that Chromium and Firefox use progressive rollouts even when their updates contain security fixes? What are the other channels for if not for testing for dangerous cookie monsters?
That would definitely be a change of policy compared to phasing in apt updates. Security updates aren’t phased at all. They’re immediately available when they hit the security archive, correct?
I’m not confirming anything (and I can’t, only the package maintainer who controls the knob for it can).
I’m pretty sure critical and high CVE fixes will roll out immediately though, like for all Ubuntu packages.
But I would also be surprised if standard releases wouldn’t be phased …
Snaps actually allow phasing on a revision to revision basis, very fine grained, one phased update doesn’t mean the next will be …
I know it may not be your department, but Canonical publishes Chromium. Maybe nonchalantly ask around the water-cooler if it uses progresessive rollouts? When someone asks you why you want to know, you could say, “Just wonderin’, that’s all.”
Anyway, there are a lot users who are noticing the discrepancy of why certain snaps get auto-refresh normally, and why certain snaps never seem to get auto-refreshed at all. If it’s due to progressive rollouts, then there could be an indication for it in the same way that apt phasing is reported.
Otherwise you have users spending an inordinate amounts of their time trying to troubleshoot what would turn out to be a non-existent problem (raises hand).
If snaps do not auto-update (unless you told them not to via the hold command indeed), this is clearly a bug (no matter if related to progressive rollouts or not) and needs to be reported, if you suspect the two are related, mention it in the bug
Snaps do auto-update, just certain ones don’t. And the issue has been reported already both on snapcraft forum and launchpad. In fact, researching the issue on both of those sites is what led me to considering progressive rollouts as a possible cause.
So I don’t think filing YABR is going to get anywhere.
