Templates restored from backup created in older release silently continue to target old repos even after updating

[deeplow]

The problem you're addressing (if any)

Users who install 4.2 via a clean install may not notice they need to upgrade the Qubes template sources to 4.2. Failing to do that they may miss on critical integrations for 4.2 like VMExec (for the updater to work) and most importantly, after 4.1 is EOL, it'll simply stop getting Qubes packages updates. Worse: from the user perspective the update process will not return any errors since there are no new packages.

The solution you'd like

Minimal solution: inform the user At the very least warn in the updater that the templates are imported from Qubes 4.1 and need to have their sources upgraded.

As for the overall issue, in 4.2 templates started advertised for which qubes version they are (more or less based on the version of qubes-core-agent package). This information isn't used anywhere yet - I guess we should add some warning based on that.

-- Marek (source)

Better solution: upgrade it for them Do the template repo upgrades for the user through the updater tool.

The value to a user, and who that user might be

[andrewdavidwong]

Updated title per @deeplow's comment, which also suggests that this affects only 4.2 (so removing affects-4.1).

[andrewdavidwong]

which also suggests that this affects only 4.2 (so removing affects-4.1)

On second thought, it is quite possible that this also affects, e.g., 4.0 templates restored in 4.1 (which probably hardly happens at all anymore, since 4.0 has been EOL for so long). However, that is merely speculation at this point, so I will refrain from adding back affects-4.1 until someone reports that it also affects 4.1.

[DemiMarie]

@andrewdavidwong I’m pretty sure that R4.1 is also affected. The fundamental problem is the same in both cases: the template restore process doesn’t automatically point the VM at new repositories.

[andrewdavidwong]

The fundamental problem is the same in both cases: the template restore process doesn’t automatically point the VM at new repositories.

My understanding is that it doesn't necessarily have to be the restore process that does it. It could instead be the update process. I've also intentionally worded the title to leave open the possibility that the fix is just a warning instead of actually changing the repo target, per https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-doc/pull/1345#issuecomment-1803517947.