Automatic update

[Steffen Kluge]

On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 07:57 -0500, Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
> 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.

Paul, as others have pointed out, a Microsoft "distribution" contains
very little software indeed. A usable Windows installation will in most
cases include software not sold by Microsoft and hence not touched or
even checked for conflicts by MS Update.

I'm a very infrequent Windows users, but looking at my son's PC there is
stuff like video drivers, Adobe reader, Skype, AdAware, games, etc, etc.
Many of them require frequent updates, sometimes critical security
patches. Does MS update care about them? You're totally on your own with
those. What's worse, there is no way of detecting and resolving
conflicts between updates to various software packages. Does MS Update
care whether an OS security patch will break your version of the NVidia
driver? Or vice versa?

How does this compare to Fedora? If you choose to install software that
is not part of the distribution you'll find yourself in the same
situation: update the extra stuff by hand, and deal with conflicts
manually. However, the Fedora distribution already comes with a ton of
useful software, extended to an exorbitant amount with the help of a
handful of supplementary repositories. All under complete control of a
single software update facility - yum - leveraging the underlying RPM
mechanism to ensure integrity.

Does yum have bugs, do package maintainers make mistakes? Of course, but
in my opinion we have a very functional and useful software update
system right now, and it is likely to get better. Windows users have
nothing of the sort, and will not likely get it in the near future.

Cheers
Steffen.

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