[Bug 1699913] Re: /var/lib/apt/lists has content in partner-images/Docker tarballs, which becomes stale quickly

[Scott Moser]

@Tianon,

You are correct that a user then would inevitably get an out of date
package.

However, removing the release pocket content
a.) means every user in every image has to download that data which does not change.
b.) only defers the potential problem until later.

Essentially, the problem is that in order to *ever* run:
  apt-get install package
you have to have run recently run "apt-get update" for some value of recently.

default cloud images (I believe) end up running apt-get update within 24 hours and
then do so on a daily-ish basis, which probably suffices as a definition of
"recently".

I think the ideal solution is to have 'apt-get install' (or 'apt install') to
run an update by default if it detects that sources are out of date or modified.

Related bug wit some other info and discussion at bug 1429285 .

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1699913

Title:
  /var/lib/apt/lists has content in partner-images/Docker tarballs,
  which becomes stale quickly

Status in cloud-images:
  New
Status in livecd-rootfs package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  In the Docker builds, we explicitly include "rm -rf
  /var/lib/apt/lists/*" to remove the APT list files, because they're
  quite large, and they get stale very quickly.

  We instead recommend users always couple "apt-get update" with their
  "apt-get install" lines (see https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide
  /eng-image/dockerfile_best-practices/#apt-get).

  Is there any chance of getting those files excluded or removed from
  the tarballs themselves?  Uncompressed, this would result in a ~30MB
  size decrease (obviously likely less dramatic for the compressed
  tarballs).  The user-facing result is that users are forced to run
  "apt-get update" before they can "apt-get install" (which for the
  Docker images, we already do, so there will be no user-facing effect
  except that the on-disk image layers will be ~30MB smaller).

  See also https://github.com/tianon/docker-brew-ubuntu-core/issues/90
  for more discussion on this (which is what led to filing this issue).
  :)

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