Arvados

The arvados-api-server package is very tied to the underlying distribution. It will use the system Ruby to install dependent gems, which includes building C extensions.

If you upgrade the distribution, arvados-api-server doesn't automatically get upgraded. The package manager sees that both distros have the same version, so it doesn't see anything to upgrade. But the server will not be able to run after all the other components get upgraded.

The workaround for this is easy: just reinstall the package. The postinst script will pick up all the new components and reinstall everything necessary.

But it would be nicer if this happened automatically when you did the big dist-upgrade or equivalent.

One weird thing I noticed: I thought this same issue would affect our Python packages too. They depend on the system Python (the installed virtualenv links to it) and there's no version difference between distributions. But somehow package managers figure out they do need to install a new version of this one. My best guess is that's because the package depends on the minor version of Python (e.g., python3.11) and so the packager figures out it wants to get this version as part of migrating from python3.9 to python3.11. I haven't confirmed this. But maybe the simplest solution is to declare a similar dependency in arvados-api-server.

Another option is to incorporate the distro version into the package version so that the package manager automatically "wants" to install the later version when you upgrade the whole distribution. Probably the most straightforward place to put this would be at the start of the package build iteration. So the first build for Debian 11 would be arvados-api-server_3.1.0-11-1, Debian 12 would be arvados-api-server_3.1.0-12-1, Ubuntu 24.04 arvados-api-server_3.1.0-24.04-1, and so on.