I have a rather old image of precise, and would like to update it from https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/ so dist-upgrade on a new VM won't be so painful. I downloaded the image, and tried to update it using this command line;

glance image-update --file precise-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img precise-server-cloudimg-amd64

The command completes immediately and dumps the image details, but neither the size or checksum have changed. Also, an immediate;

glance image-list

shows the Status as 'active'. So it seems the image-update really doesn't do what I'm expecting. I found a bug in launchpad that describes this as well.

I'm basing this on the docs, which say;

--file FILE            Local file that contains the disk image to be uploaded during the update.

I've checked /var/log/glance/api.log and there is no information there. The file is empty, and does not change when I run this command.

Am I doing something wrong, or is there a workaround?