What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Seth Vidal]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, James Antill wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 13:45 +0100, Robert Scheck wrote:
>>  Yum-updatesd could
>> get a cronjob - I think being up-to-date is nice, but being too up-to-date
>> can hurt very much for a Fedora user nowadays (e.g. dbus).
>
> The main reason¹ it was a daemon initially is that pirut/pupplet spoke
> to it over dbus.
> Changing yum-cron to use yum-updatesd --oneshot was on my TODO list a
> long time ago, but it turned out to be non-trivial and keep backwards
> compat. with both pieces ... so nothing happened to either piece.
>
>
> ¹ One other feature is that we wanted "hourly" but with a random start,
> so if everyone turned their computer on at 9am it wouldn't slam the
> repo. ... this might be possible in newer cron's though.
>

Amusingly yum has had this for a long time:

yum -R <minutes>

:)

yum-cron has used it in the past.

I'll be honest the everything-as-its-own-daemon thing is not interesting 
until you want to do desktop notifications. Only then do you need things 
to not rely on cron. For servers yum-updatesd and the various daemons 
don't make a lot of sense. Just having yum-cron run to notify and/or 
auto-update security updates is pretty reasonable, if you're not going to 
have set times when you apply updates weekly/biweekly/monthly/quarterly, 
etc

-sv