Call for comments - RPM upgrade

[Warren Togami]

Dennis Gilmore wrote:>
>>It is my opinion that RH8 and RH9 should be upgraded to the latest
>>versions for the respective distros.  Regarding Barry K. Nathan's
>>concern about the epoch promotion problem, could you please post a
>>concrete example of what triggers that problem?  The entire list needs a
>>refresher about exactly what this problem is.
> 
> 
> Most definetly i have never experienced issues with rpm  so i have never 
> bothered to look into what others have experienced.  i only know what ive 
> read from posts to mailing lists.
> 

Eh?  You *never* hit a deadlock with RH8 rpm?  I suppose the chance of 
being hit by lightning and winning the lottery on the same day is higher 
than that. =)

> 
> 
>>Two more long term notes:
>>1) Some have suggested a rewritten rhn_applet and up2date for RH7.3, RH8
>>and RH9.  They suggested that after RHN stops providing software update
>>services, perhaps a community based notification service could take its
>>place.  I personally think a centralized service may have trust issues
>>like "would you trust your server package information with total
>>strangers?"  The next best thing would be a host-based service that
>>daily checks for updates, then sends notification e-mail to the sysadmin
>>if updates are available.  The notification e-mail recipient address and
>>possibly SMTP server would then be configured during firstboot and
>>System menu.
> 
> 
> I think a better option would be removal of rhn_applet,  and approach Red Hat 
> to see if we could get a licence for a Satelite up2date server  we could then 
> rebuild up2date with the default configuration changed to point to our server  
> and not  Red Hats. This would then require the user to make a concious 
> decision to move to Fedora Legacy.  of course we would offer yum and apt for 
> maintainence but if the user wished to still use up2date we could offer that 
> service also.  this will only affect the RHL product line.  we could maybe 
> backport to RH 9 the up2date from Fedora Core 1 perhaps but that defeats the 
> goal of only providing security updates and not adding new features.

My guess is that the chances of this happening would be extremely low, 
unfortunately.  Nothing stops a third party from implementing it 
themselves though.  If that happened, the board of directors and/or 
membership would vote upon making that "official" for our community 
project, or using my idea above instead that is decentralized.

> 
> as far as notification of users goes a mailing list for announced updates 
> would be best IMHO.  a list that can only be posted to by Fedora Legacy 
> admins when updates are released.  by being read only it will be guaranteed 
> to be low traffic.  mails should be in a format simmilar to the errata 
> notification emails Red Hat Send out.

There will certainly be announce lists for the legacy project, and 
communications will also go to other lists that all distributions use 
like Bugtraq.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com