PackageKit policy: background and plans

[Seth Vidal]

On Fri, 20 Nov 2009, Owen Taylor wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 11:50 -0430, Robert Marcano wrote:
>> On 11/20/2009 10:04 AM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>>> I know basically nobody who, on a generally single user system,
>>> explicitly switches to a console to log in as root and perform package
>>> installs there. If you're not doing that then the issue is basically
>>> moot - a user-level compromise will become a root-level compromise the
>>> next time you run anything as root.
>>
>> I do that on critical workstations because a long time ago an old
>> (fixed) bug killed my X session when updating and messed my system, so I
>> do not trust too much updating base X components using a GUI. on my
>> personal systems, yes I use the GUI method
>
> This actually is one of the big advantages of PackageKit - because the
> installation is being done by a daemon rather than a process running in
> your session, if the X session dies during package installation, you
> won't be left with a half-completed transaction.
>
> Though that only helps from the command line if you use
> gpk-install-package-name rather than yum. Probably not too many people
> do that :-)

if you install from the command line using yum and you're worried about 
the install obliterating your X session I would recommend using screen.

-sv