Phased updates in APT in 21.04

Foundations
#1

Starting with this development release, with APT 2.1.16 to be precise, APT now implements phased updates. Previously, only update-manager implemented phased updates, and this was only used on desktops - the implementation in APT means this works on servers, raspberry pis, and containers, too.

This means that some updates will be hold back on some machines while they are being phased. This is being decided by a value derived from the machine-id, the package name, and package version.

To control phased updates in APT:

  • To have all your machines phase the same, set the APT::Machine-IDoption to a UUID like /etc/machine-id (the format is not being checked right now, but that might change); or point Dir::Etc::machine-id to another machine-id file.
  • To always include phased updates, set APT::Get::Always-Include-Phased-Updates to true. This is the old behavior.
  • To never include phased updates, set APT::Get::Never-Include-Phased-Updates to false.

Note that this does not apply to fresh package installs. APT also respects the options from update-manager about phased updates which are similar to the ones above.

This also applies to any tool using the APT library, such as aptitude and packagekit.

Special notes:

  • To avoid breaking existing build chroots, chroots are excluded from this change for now (as are systems without an /etc/machine-id). This may change in 21.10.
  • The /etc/machine-id file is looked up relatively to Dir::Etc setting, which is /etc/apt. So if you point Dir or Dir::Etc elsewhere, you might have to copy machine-id to the right place or set that option to /etc/machine-id, otherwise phasing will be disabled, and phased updates always included.
2 Likes
#2

Hey Julian,

Great, I always felt a bit unhappy that phasing only applied to some classes of system. I guess if we can start getting crash reports / metrics (e.g. if a systemd unit always fails after an update) out of servers, we could feed that back to the error tracker and then the phaser to make this even more useful.

Anyway, a question: for people who build packages, do we need to make any changes to always build with all updates or is apt doing something to detect these and opt out there? I’m thinking build chroots such as developers have, and also the proper Launchpad/Debian buildds.

#3

Oh right, I forgot to mention that systems without a machine-id and chroots (as detected by ischroot) are still using the classic behavior equivalent to always-include-phased-updates such that they don’t break build chroots.

I hope we can remove that ischroot code path in 21.10, that should give people time to change their build chroots.

(fixed in post)

1 Like
#4