[Bug 1876035] Re: Consider making '-o Acquire::Retries=3' the default for 'apt-get update/install/dist-upgrade'

[Julian Andres Klode]

A few points to think about:

1. I am not aware of anyone using that option, we don't know if it works
and how it behaves

2. Given 1, what kind of testing can we do? This needs to be thoroughly
tested, given that it's not been tested at all.

3. Switching IPs might be useful, but it's not clear to me yet how that
would work in practice. We can basically blacklist certain IPs so it
jumps to the next one, but we need to make sure we don't run out of IPs
I guess. Also we use one connection per hostname, so each failure would
switch the connection to a different IP address for all following
requests.

4. Does it have any kind of delay right now? I don't think it does, and
it sounds hard, and also pointless if we switch IPs.

5. I'd like to retry across different host names too.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1876035

Title:
  Consider making '-o Acquire::Retries=3' the default for 'apt-get
  update/install/dist-upgrade'

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in apt source package in Groovy:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Hi,

  We operate archive.ubuntu.com as well as mirrors of it in various
  places. We're getting reports of various CI/CD jobs failing. Sometimes
  due to routing issues, issues with overloaded servers/VMs hosting
  archive, etc.

  Any chance we can make '-o Acquire::Retries=3' the default for 'apt-
  get update/install/dist-upgrade'? Preferably with a randomised skew
  between retries.

  Also, any chance of having apt-get retry with different IPs/hosts
  returned from the DNS lookup? (e.g. for archive.ubuntu.com -
  91.189.88.142, 91.189.88.152, ...).

  Thanks.

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