Okay, so apparently, there is a long-standing bug in the Microsoft package deploy process which caused apt-get update to fail in the first half hour after Microsoft has deployed a package.
The failure looks like this:
E: Failed to fetch https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/22.04/prod/dists/jammy/InRelease Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NOSPLIT' (does the network require authentication?)
As this only happens intermittently (after a MS package deploy), the chance of running into this bug are slim, but guess what: today I ran into it.
This change to the workflow is intended to prevent the next person running into this issue from having to waste time on figuring this out.
By splitting the "Install xmllint" step into two steps: one doing the apt-get update and one doing the actual install and making the first step one which is allowed to continue-on-error, this issue should hopefully not crop up anymore.
Any errors in the apt-get update step will now be ignored and as most errors which could potentially come from that step are irrelevant for the rest of the job anyway, this is fine. If a relevant error would be surfaced, the next step (the xmllint install), will fail the job anyway.
Description
Okay, so apparently, there is a long-standing bug in the Microsoft package deploy process which caused
apt-get updateto fail in the first half hour after Microsoft has deployed a package.The failure looks like this:
As this only happens intermittently (after a MS package deploy), the chance of running into this bug are slim, but guess what: today I ran into it.
This change to the workflow is intended to prevent the next person running into this issue from having to waste time on figuring this out.
By splitting the "Install xmllint" step into two steps: one doing the
apt-get updateand one doing the actual install and making the first step one which is allowed tocontinue-on-error, this issue should hopefully not crop up anymore.Any errors in the
apt-get updatestep will now be ignored and as most errors which could potentially come from that step are irrelevant for the rest of the job anyway, this is fine. If a relevant error would be surfaced, the next step (the xmllint install), will fail the job anyway.Refs:
Suggested changelog entry
N/A