Automatic update

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 15:21, John Summerfied wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Making the new one bootable is certain to create a system that will not 
> boot, shutdown or fail in some other way without manual intervention. It 
> happened several times during the life of FC3 to my certain knowledge, I 
> believe it happened to many with FC4 and it almost certainly will happen 
> during the life of FC5.
>
> Installing new kernels is fine. Automatically making them bootable is 
> not, and that's not taking into account those who wish to boot something 
> altogether different, such as Windows, FreeBSD or Another Distro.

It's really only an issue for machines at a remote location where
you can't easily pick a working kernel at the grub prompt.  And
fedora probably isn't the best choice for machines where an
occasional surprise causes a real problem.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com