separate emails to fedora-legacy-announce for each OS

Joe Harrington jh at oobleck.astro.cornell.edu
Fri Apr 22 20:27:19 UTC 2005


> The FLP does not recommend night yum updates via cron, which is what I
> think you are recommending here.  Is this the recommendation of the
> Fedora Project?

If you type 'chkconfig yum on', you get nightly updates in FC.  It's
designed to do it, and since FC1 there have been no updates that
required any special handling.  Even the kernel gets updated this way,
without problems.  I don't see that there is any expectation that the
notices will be read.  I believe that RHEL operates this way, too, as
do many/most distros nowadays (e.g., Debian Ubuntu, cAos).  I don't
know about official policy, but I also don't know anyone who would
risk operating any other way.  The net has become an increasingly
dangerous place to compute.

> As a user, I very often want to know:

> 1) Whether an update *doesn't* apply to me.  So I want to get all the
> updates, read them, and *know* that it doesn't apply to me.  So if my
> boss, wife, who ever asks me "did you install the latest XYZ update?"
> or "should I install the latest XYZ update?" or "Why didn't you install
> the latest XYZ update?" or what ever, I can say with confidence "I researched
> the issue and that vulnerability doesn't apply in our case."

Sounds labor-intense to me.  Why not just take them all when they come
out?  yum will figure out whether you have the package, and will
update it if so.  This seems to be what's done by the vast majority of
users nowadays.  Then you can just say "yes", "yes", and "it got it
automatically the night after it hit the net" to the person asking the
questions, without needing to look up from the novel you'll now have
time to read. :-)

If it's not the recommendation of FLP to do automatic nightly yum
updates off your repos, it should be, as it will be the practice of
most FC users regardless of what you recommend.  If you make a point
of advising otherwise, it will be a strong enough incentive for many
people to switch away from Fedora completely, and go with a distro
that does support it for the long term.  FWIW, my FC1 machines have
been doing fine operating in this mode off your repos, so it doesn't
appear you need to do much, other than avoid making packages that
require manual installation.

--jh--




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