How fast are updates to boot loader packages (grub and shim) phased in?

Damian Yerrick

3/9/24, 8:14 PM

"What are phased updates, and why does Ubuntu use them?" states that sudo apt upgrade will often display "The following packages have been kept back" when an update to a stable release is made available to only a fraction of users at first. Ubuntu does this to limit the impact of unforeseen defects in updated software. "StableReleaseUpdates section Phasing" on Ubuntu Wiki states that most packages are phased in at a rate of 10 percent of the user base per 6 hours, or the entire user base within 3 days. (The wiki page cites an article by Brian Murray via a link that has since become broken. Fortunately, Murray's article "Phasing of Stable Release Updates" is archived.)

However, a few packages appear to phase in much more slowly than that. On both of the Xubuntu 22.10 machines I run, updates to grub-efi-amd64-bin, grub-efi-amd64-signed, and shim-signed have been kept back for 20 days according to the automatically generated report "Phasing Ubuntu Stable Release Updates". This long phasing time for GRUB has led to confusion among other users, such as a question by raddevus and a question by Syn Romana.

Are the rationale and rate for slower phasing of GRUB and shim documented publicly?

0 + 1

upgrade

apt

grub2

user535733

3/10/24, 3:03 AM

It's likely not a difference of *policy* or *rationale*. Those engineers, like all us, have multiple projects, many tasks to accomplish each day, different emergencies to address, and some priorities are set by others. For example, Debian 12's Hard Freeze is later this week. If you REALLY want to know the story behind the delay, drop by https://discourse.ubuntu.com and ask. They might-or-might-not be able to disclose much, since some error report(s) might be private for several good reasons.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: How fast are updates to boot loader packages (grub and shim) phased in?

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.