The updates firehose

[Don Russell]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> Anybody else think we're issuing entirely /way/ too many updates?  We've had 
> 138 "stable" updates, and 177 current "testing" updates.  If all those were 
> to go stable, we're talking over 300 updates, in just over a week.
>
> Seriously.  We're drowning our users in updates.  Are all of them really 
> necessary?  I feel like we've got this culture of update whatever/whenever 
> coming from Extras where it was just fire and forget.  While that might be 
> fun for the maintainer, is it fun for the user?  Is it fun for the user with 
> a slow connection?
>   

I'm a user (of my own system, so also an administrator).... here's my 2 
cents...

I don't really care if there is a "flood of updates".... I interpret it 
as "people are busy" at making my system better. :-) or adding new 
things to make other systems better. :-)

What I *would* like (just started thinking about it) is a procmail 
recipe to divide the  announcement e-mails into "installed" and "not 
installed" packages.

For example... I received an e-mail with this subject:
Fedora 7 Update: xorg-x11-server-1.3.0.0-8.fc7

Thats great... very consistent subject patterns, but from a programming 
point of view, how do I know where the program name ends (so I can use 
it with an rpm -q command to see if it is installed), and where the 
version number starts (so I can compare it with the results of rpm -q)? 
It would help is there was a blank between program name and version 
number... or even more explicit:
Fedora 7 Update: xorg-x11-server Version: 1.3.0.0-8.fc7

ThenI can easily just grab everything between "Update:" and "Version:" 
for the program name, and everything aftet "Version:" for the version 
number.

Ideally, I'll have procmail divide these announcements into three groups:
1 - program is installed and announcement is advising of newer version 
(yum should pick those up automatically when the nightly yum runs)
2 - program is installed and already at/beyond the announced version 
(i.e yum update beat the announcement)
3 - program is not installed, but I can look at the announcement to see 
if it's something I might be interested in