PackageKit and default update strategy

[Luke Macken]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 05:44:48PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-03-14 at 14:47 -0400, Robin Norwood wrote:
> > Also, I thought it might be a good time to revisit the default update
> > strategy.  Right now, gnome-packagekit provides an update icon similar
> > to puplet.  The default configuration is to just notify the user that
> > updates are available.  Some people have suggested applying security
> > updates automatically as the default configuration.  I personally like
> > the idea, but I suspect that some people will not like this behavior as
> > the default.
> 
> Given the number of updates we end up having (even just limited to
> security), I suspect that this isn't a great idea from a bandwidth
> perspective.  For the users who lack persistent connections (and thus
> tend to have lower bandwidth), they'd get online and then immediately
> start having their capacity drained by downloading updates.  That's why
> we've kept the more conservative default of just downloading the update
> information and notifying the user in the past

By default the PackageKit yum backend sets a 40% bandwidth throttle.
The yum dbus backend that is in the works bumps this up to 60%.

I think auto-downloading updates and prompting the user to install them
sounds like a pretty good default.

luke