Upgrade process lacks feedback

[kyrofa]

The snap upgrade process is frustratingly opaque. It looks like Nextcloud is down for however long it takes to complete the upgrade. This should be far more user-friendly, at least showing some sort of maintenance mode screen so it's clear WHY it's down.

[pawlowskatze]

Hi,
first of all: Thanks a ton for giving us that no-worries-no-hassle piece of software. It really eases Nextcloud self-hosting beyond belief. Now, being used to Nextclouds's built-in self-upgrading process, I agree that its snappy counterpart is indeed opaque.

Personally, I think that a first step towards improvement would be to make for the upgrade process to be proactive instead of reactive. See, now, an update can come in "at any time" and the user is only able to tell that from once something doesn't work as expected (lags, downtime, ...).
However, as documented by Canonical (and linked from your blog) we can delay/control when snap updates are being fetched. We cannot however tell "when will an update be available" in order to plan for it. If that would be possible, I'd be happy to go like "yeah, great - I'll take care of the update next Saturday afternoon so I have enough time to hold snap's hands during that update and can tell my wife soon enough not to worry about the photo backup downtime."

Cheers, Thomas

[pachulo]

If that would be possible, I'd be happy to go like "yeah, great - I'll take care of the update next Saturday afternoon so I have enough time to hold snap's hands during that update and can tell my wife soon enough not to worry about the photo backup downtime."

Well, you can now hold snap refreshes indefinitely which kind of fits your use-case, doesn't it?

[pawlowskatze]

Hi @pachulo - yep, thanks. I know.
And that's somehow exactly the point I was trying to make here:

If I switch to hold back updates... (until I have time to take care) how will I know that there IS an update at all?
I just want to break out of the status quo, to either have to accept updates coming in and happening without knowing about it - or to hold them back until I have time ...but not knowing about their existence either.

Is there a way to have a kind of notification/email, you name it, that tells me "dude, there's an update you'll need to take care of"? At the moment, I need to intentionally LOOK for it. Nextcloud's internal update checks won't probably fit because what they publish doesn't fit to the snap update availability, right? So that leaves me with having to check snap updates on-demand (meaning: whenever it comes to my mind to check for it).

Cheers, Thomas

[pachulo]

Is there a way to have a kind of notification/email, you name it, that tells me "dude, there's an update you'll need to take care of"?

Not that I know @pawlowskatze . But I guess it won't be very difficult to craft a script to compare the installed snap version with the one available in latest/stable, and then send an e-mail in case they are different.
So, by holding the refreshes indefinitely and running such a script daily with cron, you would get something similar to what you are looking for, won't you?