Up2date replacement

Don Springall don_springall at hotmail.com
Fri Nov 25 21:55:53 UTC 2005


Since the Up2date icon has disappeared off the desktop I assume Fedora is 
going with some other standard way of doing updates.

I  currently find that updating in fedora is a hit and miss proposition and 
I do not trust any of them. I ran yumex this morning and it reports nothing 
to update. The same with pup. I run up2date and it finds updates. 
Obliviously yumex and pup decided to use some not uptodate mirror. I am 
starting to believe that YUMEX uses some random number generator to pick 
which mirror it uses. At least with Up2date it tells you what channel it is 
starting with. Does pup and YUMEX use --obsoletes by default ? Who knows ! 
Up2date lets you decide to install the updates or not after everything is 
downloaded so you can do that later if you have run out of time.  I believe 
RPM used to have a rollback option but that seems to have been dropped from 
the latest documentation.

What I am getting at is that the current list of alternatives to up2date 
while greatly improved in some areas still needs improvement and has 
regressed in some ways.  Compared to the old up2date it is easier to add 
mirrors to alternate sites like LVN in YUM, Yum tries another mirror if the 
current one fails and Yum makes resolving dependencies a lot easier.

In Microsoft land the system keeps a list of patches so you can delete them 
if they fail, has a rollback facility for service packs, has a rollback 
facility for device drivers in device manager if your new driver sucks, 
never seems to have broken dependencies and has one central site so you 
don't have to worry that the mirror is up to date or not. Microsoft updates 
do break you box sometimes but not more often than "rawhide" updates.

This is one area that I think REDHAT should spend a lot more development 
dollars on. It would also help if there were more groups for "group update"  
ie one for Gnome, KDE,  Openoffice and Eclipse etc if yum and yumex are the 
direction things are going. Please take PUP out back and beat it to death 
with a big stick. BAD DOG !





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