The updates firehose

[Don Russell]

Don Russell wrote:
> 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

As I started looking into this more, I realized the needed information 
(package name, version, etc) are already nicely formatted in the message 
body.... so, no need to add a blank in the subject line material. :-)