Automatic update

[Anthony Messina]

Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
> One of the original reasons that I chose Redhat/Fedora was the ability
> to learn easily that an update was available and/or necessary and get
> that update installed.  I liked the panel applet notification but that
> feature has been a rocky road, it used to work, didn't work and who
> knows at any given time what it does now.  So I've pretty much given
> up on the panel notification applet.  Red Hat update was equally rocky
> with repo hell mimicking dll hell on Windows.  That has gotten better
> over time (with Yum, haven't used Red Hat update in ages).  Now my
> wife points out that Microsoft has a painless and practical update
> facility that appears to be what I was looking for from Linux.  So my
> question is: why has the Redhat/Fedora update facility fallen into
> such disrepair?  And is there any reason to expect that it will become
> competitive with Microsoft's with FC5 and follow ons?.  It would be
> unfortunate to hear that the answer is Redhat Enterprise versions.  I
> don't mind paying but I do mind running stale software.  I'll pay
> gladly to live on the bleeding edge.  Even the lack of Firefox 1.5 with
> FC4 is disturbing, enough to make me wonder what all the fuss over
> Ubuntu is all about.
> 
> -pmr
> 
yum has a service for nightly update in fc4 (and maybe others). why 
don't you edit the associated scripts to only download the packages, not 
install them?  that would be the identical behavior that ms allows, or 
you could choose to have them automatically applied by just enabling the 
current service.  as another writer mentioned, you kernel is never 
updated per se.  the new one is just installed and /etc/grub.conf is 
changed to boot into the new one, but your old kernel stays safe and sound.

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