How are OS updates handled by default in FC5?

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 07:06, Dan Kegel wrote:

> > > >
> > > > Nothing, really, not since FC4.  Something may be in the works for FC6.
> > > > Some people think that automatic yum updates take its place -- but such
> > > > updates are disabled by default.
> > >
> > > I see.  FC5 is a bit broken, then, from a security point of view.  Tsk.
> >
> > No it isn't.
> > You can run yum as a service and it will nightly grab updates -
> > including from third party repositories you can enabled.
> >
> > There isn't a notification area to inform of updates - but I always
> > thought that was a broken way to do it - because users who don't have
> > r00t have no way to respond.
> 
> The user who is root, however, has no way to *decline* patches
> without manually polling.
> That (and the fact that updates aren't on by default) is the "broken" bit.
> - Dan

That's a matter of opinion.  You have to trust that no update
will ever break anything to have automatic updates on by
default.  If you look through the list archives you'll see
that hasn't always been the case.

I do agree that yum is slightly broken by no longer supporting
the --download-only option.  That part could be run automatically
(or manually without attention) and in the older versions used
to ensure that the part you wanted to do manually would complete
in a reasonable amount of time.  While the current version
will quit if it can't complete all the needed downloads there
is no way to know how long it will take or if it will be
able to complete at all which is very bad for scheduling the
changes and possible downtime for reboots.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com