How are OS updates handled by default in FC5?

[Dan Kegel]

On 4/24/06, Boris Glawe <boris at boris-glawe.de> wrote:
> The system ist always updated with yum.
> [snip]
> createrepo examines all rpm files in the current directory and subdirectories
> [and] creates the repodata directory automatically.
> If you mirror a repository .., you will not have to run
> this repodata command, as it's already provided by the mirror server.
>
> If you create your own rpm files, you will always have to run createrepo
> each time you add an updated or new rpm file to you repository/directory.

Thanks for the excellent summary.  That matches what I learned from
http://fedoranews.org/contributors/richard_flude/repo/
and from experimentation.  I now have a shell script which successfully
creates a repository from my own rpms using createrepo.

> On the client side you will only have to run "yum -y update", either
> manually or by a cronjob. The latter is the solution chosen by fedora.
> Of course the URL of the repository must be specified in a file with the
> suffix ".repo" in /etc/yum.repos.d . Use the already existent repo files
> as an example how these files look like. The syntax is very easy.

I have the yum.repos.d stuff figured out, too, and I understand that
yum can run from a cron job.

What I'm confused about is - what is the *default* status?  By default,
yum is not run from a cron job, is it?  And pup is not run automatically
on user login, is it?  In other words, is it true that FC5 by default requires
manual action before a user can see the list of current security updates?

That would be in contrast to Red Hat 9 and from Ubuntu, both of which
automatically alert the user (even if he does nothing!) about the available
security patches.

- Dan