setting "refresh-installer" to anything, autoinstall becomes manual install

[Valentijn Sessink]

I'm setting up autoinstalled desktops, as follows:
- unpacked the ubuntu-22.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso to an USB stick
- changed "grub.cfg" to read: ...vmlinuz autoinstall 'ds=nocloud-net;s=https://...../'
- set up user-data, vendor-data (empty) and meta-data (empty)

The user-data file is attached to this report.

However, I'd like to add an extra sources.list file with a "signed-by" clause, and this was only very recently introduced into Curtin (see Bug #1892494) - I'm not even sure what I want is there, so I was going to try. So for a start, I wanted to:
  refresh-installer:
    update: yes
    channel: beta

However, whenever I put "refresh-installer" in the user-data file, even if "update" says "no", the installer stops autoinstalling and starts a manual install. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I cannot see what it is. Setting refresh-installer to "true" makes the installation manual. Setting "interactive-sections" to "refresh-installer" will, strangely enough, ask if I'd like to refresh the installer *and it will continue the autoinstall*.

Tried to see if I could make anything of the python code - but no.

[Valentijn Sessink (valentijn)]

Could this be a race condition? Because that's what it feels like.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

The report sounds a bit unlikely on the face of it given how "interactive or not" is decided but bugs can be strange of course.

The user-data file has the refresh-installer section commented out so presumably it's not exactly the one that causes issues. I can't reproduce this with a simple user-data file containing refresh-installer.

I guess there could be a race condition where perhaps subiquity sometimes examines the cloud-init config before cloud-init is ready (and the refresh-installer stuff is just a red herring) but I don't recall any reports of that.

[Valentijn Sessink (valentijn)]

I'm doing this with real hardware - Thinkpad Carbon X1 Gen6. Could not reproduce with virtual hardware. Hope to have time to re-evaluate this month.