firefox snap took 20 minutes to update

[[e-mail]]

I logged and firefox was unavailable, no indication of update, nothing.
When I tried to launch firefox I was invited to install it BUT I klnow it's installed, so I tried to install it but it said to me I needed to 'snap refresh', I tried to snap refresh but it indicated that everything was up to date. I tried to uninstall/reinstall the firefox snap and at this moment,
I got the indication that the update was in progress since 15 MINUTES ! Then I tried to remove the snap because I was sure it's bugged : in 20.04 firefox never took more than 2 mins to update and my machine BUT after 20 minutes firefox launched... wtf ?

I'm an ubuntu user since circa 2005 and I believe firefox was already the default browser then, this is the worse user experience I've ever had.

1/ I never selected auto-update, let me update when I want : being blocked 15 MINUTES by the OS is not a good user experience, I know this is accepted by Windows users but I prefer to use Ubuntu
2/ If you want to update tell me you're updating not that the application is not installed : really not a good idea if you want your users to trust you

I've waited 6 months after 22.04 release to migrate from 20.04 because I don't want to have this kind of bugs, I hope you do something really quick because this is not at the level of quality expected by your users.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

If this happened yesterday, it could very well have been caused by a temporary outage of snap store services. See the "Incident History" section at https://status.snapcraft.io/.

Sep 21, 2022
Component "api.snapcraft.io - refresh" and a few other components are Down
Incident Duration
From Sep 21, 2022 10:20 PM CEST to Sep 21, 2022 11:48 PM CEST (1 hr 27 mins)
Affected Components
dashboard.snapcraft.io (Production Services), api.snapcraft.io - refresh (Production Services), snapcraft.io website (Production Services), assertions.ubuntu.com (Production Services), Snap downloads (Production Services), api.snapcraft.io - search (Production Services)

Component "api.snapcraft.io - refresh" and a few other components are Down
Incident Duration
From Sep 21, 2022 10:06 PM CEST to Sep 21, 2022 10:20 PM CEST (13 mins)
Affected Components
dashboard.snapcraft.io (Production Services), api.snapcraft.io - refresh (Production Services), assertions.ubuntu.com (Production Services), Snap downloads (Production Services), api.snapcraft.io - search (Production Services)

While this is frustrating and a rather poor user experience, this is not a bug in firefox itself.
I'm closing the bug, feel free to re-open if you have evidence that the problem was caused by something else than the outage of snap store services.

[[e-mail] (kaillasse91)]

Thanks for the quick response, so this is not a bug affecting the firefox package, it's a bug in the packaging used by firefox ? I guess you're right, sorry for the noise but as firefox is the only consumer of snap on my system I thought it was valid to fill under the firefox package.
I really appreciate your detailled answer but I'm really puzzled as to what I'm supposed to do as imho this should clearly not happen in an LTS.
Should I fill a bug against the snap package as the problem is not the outage (service outages are ok) but the fact that the outage is not gracefully handled on the user side ?

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

That's fair enough, the problem appeared as being with firefox itself, even though the underlying cause was the outage of the snap store services.

I'm not really sure how the user experience could be improved in case of an outage. I'm opening a snapd task for this bug though, let's see what the snapd team thinks about this kind of situation (which I agree is very puzzling and a bad experience from a user perspective).

[Miguel Pires (miguelpires1)]

Hi. Thank you for opening a bug report. I'm not sure that the store outage could prevent a snap from being used for 20 minutes since the snap remains available during the part of the update that fetches snaps and assertions from the store. The snap only becomes unavailable later when it's absolutely necessary. In order to help us understand what happened, could you run this script https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/blob/master/debug-tools/snap-debug-info.sh and share the output with us? Also if you could run `snap changes` to see the latest changes, identify the change corresponding to the slow firefox update and then run `snap change <change_id>` with that update's ID, that might give us an idea of what happened. Thank you for your help.

[[e-mail] (kaillasse91)]

Hi,

the incident tooks place the 22 sept I guess it's the boot around 2h40, I tried to launch firefox seconds after booting.

I can't retrieve the 'snap change <change_id>' because 'snap changes' only
output this :
ID Status Spawn Ready Summary
18 Done today at 05:52 CEST today at 05:53 CEST Auto-refresh snap "snapd"
I guess too much time have passed.

You'll find the infos asked attached.

[Sergio Cazzolato (sergio-j-cazzolato)]

I tried to reproduce breaking the connection to the snap store but the issue was not reproduced.

Please, in case it happens again,
 . run the https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/blob/master/debug-tools/snap-debug-info.sh if that happens again
 . provide the output of snap change <change_id>` with that update's ID

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for snapd because there has been no activity for 60 days.]