Setting origin to PPA post-install does not update APT sources or landscape-client

[James Hebden]

Current trunk (rev 55 lp:charms/trusty/landscape-client)
Ubuntu Xenial 16.04

Changing the origin setting does nothing post-install, as the origin config entry is only used when running the install hook. This makes setting the origin post-install do nothing, and means upgrades to Landscape client can not be performed unless the upstream package is upgraded. Switching to a package contained in a newer PPA is not possible.

[David Britton (dpb)]

Hi James -- Is changing the PPA post deploy a regular part of the bootstack process, or something that you noticed as a one-off?

[James Hebden (ec0)]

Hi David,

Given we primarily work with LTS releases of Ubuntu in customer clouds, it's common for us to use the stable PPAs for various Canonical infrastructure tools to get newer tooling on existing clouds.

Often this approach is used on even the current LTS, given the specific major versions of specific packages will often be locked in at launch.

Landscape has been tricky in the past for us to upgrade in this fashion, as the charm does not respond to changes of origin. If we could get this addressed it would be a huge help when maintaining bootstack clouds ongoing. The current process would be to manually SSH to each unit and add the PPA, and upgrade the client software - Which isn't very jujuy.

Short answer would be that we need this ongoing, it's not a one-off.

- James

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

Is it enough if we handle upgrades only? Adding new PPAs and upgrading landscape-client we can do reasonably easily. But downgrading to a lower version is a bit tricky, so I'd like to not care about downgrading for now.

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

The fix is now available in the edge channel as cs:landscape-client-29.

Pending QA to be released into the stable channel.

[Paul Goins (vultaire)]

I'm guessing this may have been fixed (but never moved to fix released) in the old charm code, but the rewritten landscape-client charm seems to have the same problem. I tried changing the install_sources, but nothing changed; I had to remove and re-add the subordinate relation to get hooks to re-run and have packages install.

[Mitch Burton (mitchburton)]

The currently released revision of the charm (63) replaces the install_sources config with ppa (https://charmhub.io/landscape-client/configure#ppa), which should add a PPA if the config is present. However, I don't think it removes previously-added PPAs, and doesn't allow for non-PPA sources.

If this isn't the behaviour you want, I recommend opening an issue on https://github.com/canonical/landscape-client-charm, which is where development on this charm currently is.