FC7 plan comments

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 22:22 -0800, David Lutterkort wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 00:52 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Callum Lerwick (seg at haxxed.com) said: 
> > > On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 22:30 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > > > While we are talking about bugs and daemons, can we maybe rewrite
> > > > yum-updatesd in a language that makes it use less than 10MB ? It is by
> > > > far the biggest of the useless daemons...
> > > 
> > > Why is it even a resident daemon?
> > 
> > It's used by the update applet - the applet queries it for available
> > updates, and by having the daemon resident, it saves bloat and slowness
> > in the applet. (Basically, the same code would have to be in one
> > place or the other...)
> 
> What state does the daemon keep in memory in between talking to the
> applet that makes it useful as a daemon ? The whole mechanism is still
> pull based. Why doesn't something like the following work:
>       * cron runs yum-update-check (which does essentially what the
>         daemon does now) every N hours and leaves files with info about
>         update state behind
>       * applet looks at files to determine what needs to be done
> 
> I am sure there is a variation on this that uses dbus for the
> communication from the cronjob to the applet (which could be as simple
> as 'applet check the files')
> 

1. anacron isn't required by anything and relying on it is not the
wisest of choices from what I've experienced
2. spawning something from cron every N hours implies a lot about the
system being on and how often. Having a daemon that runs whenever it is
awake lessens that problem.


I don't generally run yum-updatesd b/c I like to play with yum stuff a
bit and they can get in each other's way. However, when it has checked
for updates it appears to have a size of about 35M virt and 22M res.
That's with extras, core, updates and livna repos.

When I run 'yum shell' and get it to list available packages it comes
out to be much the same size. I'm sure there are places to save memory
and we're working on some of them but I don't think translating the
daemon into another language will really aid in that.

-sv