packagekit can fail with "Cannot refresh cache whilst offline" on Ubuntu/Debian

[jordansissel]

Some error response from packagekit causes mgmt to get stuck, I think?
This particular use cases relies on --converged-timeout 10, so my expectation is that it exits shortly after or retries having not satisfied the pkg[] resource bits.

00:53:16 engine: pkg[qemu-guest-agent]: Apply: pkg[autogroup:(qemu-guest-agent,ptyxis,openssh-server,gnome,gdm3,accountsservice)]
00:53:16 engine: pkg[qemu-guest-agent]: Set(installed): pkg[autogroup:(qemu-guest-agent,accountsservice,gdm3,gnome,openssh-server,ptyxis)]...
00:53:16 engine: pkg[qemu-guest-agent]: Error: error during Process(): can't refresh cache: packagekit error 2: Cannot refresh cache whilst offline

<and then all that remains is an endless void of waiting>

I waited a few minutes before interrupting mgmt.

This error, to me, indicates something wrong with packagekit[1]. However, I don't think mgmt should get stuck. I can't say I know what the correct behavior is, though, maybe aborting the pkg step and trying again?

[1] Why does packagekit think it is offline? I dunnno. Modern linux is fascinatingly complex in perhaps unnecessary ways. The machine is, in fact, not "offline" so I don't know what this means. I'll do separate packagekit reserach outside the scope of this isue to try and figure out why packagekit is being foolish.

[purpleidea]

I waited a few minutes before interrupting mgmt.

When you press ^C does it exit mgmt within about a second? (If not then this is a major bug.)

I don't think mgmt should get stuck.

Are you are expecting it to exit after 10 seconds because of converged-timeout? It turns out that an errored resource must not count as converged. If there is a different feature that you'd like though, we can discuss it if you can explain what the goal you're trying to achieve is.

aborting the pkg step and trying again?

This you can absolutely specify. Use the Meta:retry param. There are other similar params like limit/burst which you may wish to combine with this.

Why does packagekit think it is offline

This is a good question. There's a FAQ entry about that here: https://cockpit-project.org/faq (search for the word "offline"). AFAICT this feels like an ubuntu/debian problem unfortunately. If you think there's a way we can workaround it in the pkg resource, we definitely should, but otherwise this is unfortunate. At the minimum you could open up a feature request in PackageKit to let that state be controlled via the API.

I looked here: https://github.com/PackageKit/PackageKit/issues/ and didn't find anything obvious, but it was a quick cursory look.