Subiquity crashes on refresh

[Paride Legovini]

Scenario:

 - Focal ISO image with subiquity 21.01.1
 - Stable channel has 21.01.2 available
 - Subiquity asks to update (refresh) the installer
 - If asked to update, subiquity crashes
 - The snap gets refreshed despite the crash

Traceback:

2021-01-27 10:45:05,552 DEBUG subiquity.server.server:293 request to /refresh crashed
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/snap/subiquity/2255/lib/python3.6/site-packages/subiquity/common/api/server.py", line 123, in handler
    serializer.serialize(def_ret_ann, result),
  File "/snap/subiquity/2255/lib/python3.6/site-packages/subiquity/common/serialize.py", line 101, in serialize
    annotation, value, metadata, path)
  File "/snap/subiquity/2255/lib/python3.6/site-packages/subiquity/common/serialize.py", line 46, in _scalar
    path, value, annotation)
AssertionError: at , 5 is not a <class 'int'>

I'm going to attach the logs tarball in a moment.

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

/var/log/installer tarball.

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

I'm not sure if this is specific to this kind of crash, but I noticed that the generated /var/crash/*.crash files are empty.

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

I'm not sure it still affects subiquity 21.01.2 (there's no newer version in the stable channel so this is not straightforward to test), but it likely does.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Oh whoops a change id is not an integer in the snapd api but rather a string (which happens to represent an integer). I had it wrong in the fake data used in dry runs :(

The annoying part about this is that all updates from 20.04.2 media will hit this and there's no way to fix that. Ah well -- I think this is mpstly cosmetic, right? You choose to update and instead of seeing the nice progress bar, you get to see an error dialog and then everything restarts? A bad experience but not fatally so, if so.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/pull/889

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

Yes this is cosmetic, the refresh works fine, but it's pretty ugly.

We can't fix the already released 20.04.2 ISOs, however we could wait for the Focal 20.04.3 RCs before publishing anything in the stable channel, so users of the 20.04.3 ISOs won't hit the bug, and users of 20.04.2 ISOs concerned by the crash have a newer ISO to download. Would it make sense from the subiquity release plans point of view?

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Thanks for confirming.

6 months is a pretty long time to wait between releases. I guess we can see how much we get implemented how soon!

[George P Brown (ramakin)]

why are the fixes from 2021

[Dan Bungert (dbungert)]

@johnfrandes - for the second time, why are you changing state on old fixed bugs?