[systemd-devel] Ordering (apt) timer services to not run at the same time

[Julian Andres Klode]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 11:30:35PM +0200, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> Hi systemd folks,
> 
> (service and timer files being discussed at the bottom)
> 
> we are currently reworking the way automatic updates and upgrades work
> on Ubuntu and Debian systems. We basically have two persistent timers
> with associated services:
> 
> 1. apt-daily - Downloads new lists and packages
> 2. apt-daily-upgrade - Performs upgrades
> 
> The first job should run spread out through the day (we run it twice
> due to some other reasons), the latter in the morning between 6 and 7,
> and at boot, daily-upgrade should be resumed after daily (so we added
> After ordering relations to apt-daily-upgrade timer and service).
> 
> Now, we seem to be missing one bit: If daily-upgrade is already
> running, and daily is about to start, daily should wait for
> daily-upgrade to finish. I had hoped that maybe that works
> automatically given that there is some ordering relation between the
> two, but that did not work out. I tried adding Conflicts, but systemd
> then said "loop to fast" and became unresponsive (not sure if caused
> by this, but maybe).

Now it did not loop to fast, so I came to the following observation: We
basically need something like Conflicts that does not kill the already
running (oneshot) service, but simply waits for it to end on its own.

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