automatic nightly updates

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Joe Harrington <jh at oobleck.astro.cornell.edu>:

> No, I don't think any distro enables them by default.  But Fedora,
> Ubuntu, and RHEL all document and encourage the practice.

Red Hat's Best Practices docs do *NOT* recommend auto updates.  Of
course, only "production level" people tend to follow Best Practices,
and not "general users."  I have no real problem with general users
using auto updates, but I would say not too many "general users" are
using Fedora Legacy either.

Where do you think Red Hat recommends this at?  I'd love to see any
references people have.

> Remember
> that there is a heavy cost to *not* updating, even for a short time,
> and the vast majority of users don't do manual updates, whether for
> lack of knowledge, time, or motivation.  So it's a matter of choosing
> the better of two evils, for most people, and hence for the distros.

I'll agree to that for "normal users" but not for those running 
production machines, research clusters, etc.

> If you consider that the source of your updates is the same as the
> source of your base OS, you should in principle be happy to get any
> improvements.

Heck, we test each new OS release before we put it in production, why
wouldn't we do the same with the updates?

> --jh--

-- 
Eric Rostetter