Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

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Remember, snaps always auto-update, and (AFAIK) there is no plans to ever change this. I recommend reading the FRR Routing thread [0], where an author presents a very solid case for manual updates (keeping routers stable), and Snap maintainers refuse.

Even in the very latest snapd version, your only choices are;

- Pause all updates, but only for 60 days max

- Revert a single snap, but only until author releases a new version. This can be only done once (twice on some systems), so if you want even older versions, you are out of luck.

This policy seems very inappropriate for Linux systems where people traditionally value having a control over the code they run. It is much closer to Android/iPhone "app store" model -- but even those at allow disabling automated updates!

[0] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

Author of the article here.

We have had some more recent conversations [0] about update control. There are also workarounds in the meantime [1].

  [0] - https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/re-visiting-update-control-on-the-desktop/17170

  [1] - https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/snap-method-to-remove-auto-updates/21199

thanks for your response!

I read those threads, and it seems the conclusions were:

(1) There will be an additional mechanism that allows for up to 7 days -- and that includes daily acknowledgements. Oh, and it is desktop only, it does not work on servers.

So this means that if I leave my computer for more than 24 hours (like for the weekend) I come back and see my software updated. Let's hope that presentation was not monday morning!

(2) If I want to have deb-like mechanism I need to "Rebuild snapd itself"

(3) There is no work planning on replicating deb-like mechanism that allows indefinite postponement of updates. This is because every core developer thinks this is a bad idea.

Did I get this right?

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