question: ostree admin upgrade does it twice

[johan-smits]

When we run a ostree admin upgrade it deploys a new one (when there is one).
When you run it again (and you did not reboot yet to the new one) it does a redeploy of the already deployed again.
Why does it redeploy when the last one was successful?

We want to cron the upgrade task on the desktops but we are limited to daily because we do not want to reboot automatically but we want to check for updates more frequently.

[cgwalters]

You can do the "download but don't deploy" with a raw "ostree pull". We don't have good porcelain for this right now though.

[paulvt]

One would expect ostree admin upgrade downloads and decides not to deploy if it already has done so.
You do get this desired behaviour if you are already booted to the newest OS:

$ sudo ostree admin upgrade

1 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 313 B transferred in 0 seconds                                                   
No update available.

[cgwalters]

Yes - it's complex, one reason we do a redeploy is to re-do copying /etc, in case there were any changes. See also coreos/rpm-ostree#40

Big picture, at some point I'd like to merge the "pure ostree daemon" code from https://github.com/endlessm/eos-updater into ostree, and have it support things like "background pull of updates, deploy last pulled and reboot".

[cgwalters]

Daemon aside, I think it'd be pretty easy to implement:

ostree admin upgrade --pull-only  # Run this in a cron job
ostree admin upgrade --deploy --reboot # Run this to actually do the deployment, just before rebooting

[johan-smits]

We use it in a desktop environment and we want to prevent a reboot (users can be working on their desktop and do not appreciate a reboot in the middle of their work).

Will have a look at https://github.com/endlessm/eos-updater

[cgwalters]

I took a quick crack at this in #642

[cgwalters]

Going to close this as fixed by #642 - but I only lightly tested that, so feel free to reopen. There's definitely bigger picture stuff here around having better tooling than raw ostree admin upgrade to fix, but I think the raw functionality is there now.