setting core.refresh.hold to "forever" in /var/lib/snapd/config.json leads to "cannot unmarshal snap "core" option "refresh.hold" into *time.Time: parsing time "\"forever\"" as "\"2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00\"": cannot parse "forever\"" as "2006", json: "forever""

[Thomas Bechtold]

The public cloud team wants to disable all snap refreshs during image build.
What we do currently in a chroot is:

$ pushd "$scratch_d/var/lib/snapd"
$ jq -c '.data.config.core.refresh.hold |= "forever"' state.json >state.json.tmp
$ mv state.json.tmp state.json
$ popd

but when such a image boots, the snapd.service journal contains the following message(s):

Feb 01 08:22:28 ip-172-31-37-149 snapd[380]: stateengine.go:149: state ensure error: internal error: cannot unmarshal snap "core" option "refresh.hold" into *time.Time: parsing time "\"forever\"" as "\"2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00\"": cannot parse "forever\"" as "2006", json: "forever"
Feb 01 08:22:28 ip-172-31-37-149 snapd[380]: stateengine.go:149: state ensure error: internal error: cannot unmarshal snap "core" option "refresh.hold" into *time.Time: parsing time "\"forever\"" as "\"2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00\"": cannot parse "forever\"" as "2006", json: "forever"
Feb 01 08:22:28 ip-172-31-37-149 snapd[380]: stateengine.go:149: state ensure error: internal error: cannot unmarshal snap "core" option "refresh.hold" into *time.Time: parsing time "\"forever\"" as "\"2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00\"": cannot parse "forever\"" as "2006", json: "forever"
Feb 01 08:22:28 ip-172-31-37-149 snapd[380]: stateengine.go:149: state ensure error: internal error: cannot unmarshal snap "core" option "refresh.hold" into *time.Time: parsing time "\"forever\"" as "\"2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00\"": cannot parse "forever\"" as "2006", json: "forever"

[Maciej Borzecki (maciek-borzecki)]

Can you indicate what is the version if the snapd package and the snapd snap installed in the system?

[Thomas Bechtold (toabctl)]

This is on Jammy amd64 on AWS EC2 with:

# snap list|grep snapd
snapd 2.61.1 20671 latest/stable canonical** snapd

# dpkg -l|grep snapd
ii snapd 2.58+22.04.1 amd64 Daemon and tooling that enable snap packages

# uname -a
Linux ip-172-31-34-150 6.2.0-1018-aws #18~22.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jan 10 22:54:16 UTC 2024 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[Thomas Bechtold (toabctl)]

@Maciej , I'm happy to provide access to a EC2 node if you want for investgation.

[Nicholas Neumann (aggienick02)]

I am also hitting this. I'm trying to do the same thing, but with Ubuntu 23.10 instead. I don't need to go to the lengths of purging snap, but just want my image to not try to update snaps. But if there's not a nice way to do that, I guess purging snap may be the only real option.

[Maciej Borzecki (maciek-borzecki)]

There's a PR up https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/13544 hopefully this will be sorted out soon.

[Nicholas Neumann (aggienick02)]

@Maciej, thanks for pointing me to this. Looking at it was helpful, and also made me realize that a workaround until "forever" works is pretty easy, e.g.,

jq -c '.data.config.core.refresh.hold |= "2300-01-01T00:00:00Z"' state.json > state.json.tmp

(This seems to work well. effectiveRefreshHold returns 290 years from the current time, so this is safely a bit less than forever, just 275+ years.)

[Nicholas Neumann (aggienick02)]

I noticed that even with refresh hold set, snapd still makes multiple calls daily to api.snapcraft.io. Is that expected? Is there any way to stop them?

[Ernest Lotter (ernestl)]

Fix will be released with snapd 2.62