phablet-config writable-image -p foobar doesn't apt-get update

[Cris Dywan]

There's a race condition causing package installation failures even though I update very often because apt-get update is not being called unless passing a custom ppa or folder neither of which I need.

The fix is to always update, I tried it locally and it now works.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: phablet-tools 1.0+14.04.20140207-0ubuntu1 [modified: usr/bin/phablet-config]
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-8.28-generic 3.13.2
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-8-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.13.2-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Tue Feb 25 13:07:47 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-07-03 (237 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Release amd64 (20130424)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: phablet-tools
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2013-11-21 (95 days ago)

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

Any feedback? From my point of view this bug makes the phablet-config virtually unusable yet I need the functionality.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

It's estimated to have a moderate impact on a large portion of Ubuntu users.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

We use this tool in our CI infrastructure for installing test packages; we don't want to run apt-get update to install testpackages because you might end up installing install packages that are newer than what is supposed to be on the image, giving you an unknown image package configuration on the image.

If we want to use phablet-config also for convenience, we could add a flag that forces to run apt-get update before installing packages.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

There is no "convenience" here. If you don't update you can't install any packages unless you have the very latest image when it comes out . You get 404 errors because the package cache is out of date.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

The problem of not updating the archive index is that it might not be able to find the desirable packages, which is a valid problem.

If the testing tool really want to make sure a specific version is installed, it should force that instead. We're just lucky here that we didn't have issues with this, as I believe we're always testing a fresh image. At the moment we decide to test an older image, we'll get 404 errors.

We can hold this fix, but it'd be nice if we could improve our CI tools to do the right thing instead.

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

Personally, I believe the right thing to do is not have autopilot in debs; that solves most of the problems.

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

'phablet-tools' is no longer included in any currently supported release of Ubuntu. I'm closing this as 'Invalid' in order to tidy up the outstanding list of '100 Papercuts' bug reports.