Firefox snap updates for non-technical users

[Keith]

On 9/1/22 6:18 AM, Ian Bruntlett wrote:
> Hi Oli,
> 
> On Thu, 1 Sept 2022 at 11:37, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com 
> <mailto:ogra at ubuntu.com>> wrote:
> 
>     for now, the user should stop the app and either update it manually
>     through the snap-store app's update button or via terminal through a
>     simple "sudo snap refresh" (no need to specify the package name btw,
>     snapd knows what can be updated) ...
> 
> 
> Thanks for that. I might be getting confused but earlier this week on my 
> system, I used "snap refresh" to update all apps - Firefox in particular 
> and the "Ubuntu Software" app still thought I needed to perform an 
> update. I've just checked and "Ubuntu Software" says "Software is up to 
> date". Is there a time lag between snap and "Ubuntu Software"?
> 

Yeah, sorta. "Ubuntu Software" (referred to snap-store from now on) 
relies on packagekit for its updating and other package management 
functions. When you issue a snap command from the terminal, you're 
interfacing directly with the snapd daemon. When going through the 
snap-store, packagekit interfaces with snapd through a plugin. I believe 
that packagekit has to check for updates itself to convey that 
information to the snap-store. What I don't know is if it uses the 
snapd's system refresh.timer setting to periodically check for updates 
or if its on its own time table. Ideally, upon a manual refresh snapd 
would send a dbus message telling packagekit to immediately update its 
list in the snap-store and not wait for the next refresh event. Maybe 
that'll be a future enhancement.

So when you refresh from the command line, packagekit (and therefore 
snap-store) may not have checked for refreshes yet to update its list, 
and that's why you see snaps still listed as needing refreshes even 
though you manually already updated them.

To update the list in the snap-store you can click the refresh button in 
the upper left corner. It's the equivalent of "snap refresh --list"

-- 
Keith