Catchy subject, non? :-) What I really mean is YaST Online Update. What is up with that program? I've tried using SuSE several times in the past, only to give up based on the (apparent) stupidity of this one program. But so many people use SuSE, that it tells me either there are a whole lot more tolerant people in this world than I think that are willing to put up with this thing, or I just fundamentally misunderstand what this program is all about. Let's go with option 2 for now.
As best I can tell, this program is supposed to connect to an FTP site, look at the available update rpms, and let you install the updates. Further, it looks like it is _supposed_ to preselect items for update that apply to your system. This seems pretty straight forward, and pretty common (RedHat has RHN, Mandrake has Mandrake Update, etc). So, Monday night I did an FTP install of SuSE 8.1 on an old machine. Install went fine. Ran YOU after the setup was done, it preselected 3 packages out of the several dozen listed that have been updated. (Oh, this is all ncurses based, not X, the machine's a bit underpowered for that). I let it do the updates, but I get curious - why so many packages that _don't_ need to be updated. Some stuff is obviously updates that could never apply to the system in question (KDE updates, for example - not a single KDE rpm is installed - why is it showing me this? YaST Onine _UPDATE_. Show me updates, not things that aren't even installed on my system, but whatever, that's the subject of another rant). So I ftp to the site that YOU had used and check the updates there, doing much 'rpm -qa|grep' on another console. Some stuff is already up-to-date. I'm guessing SuSE updates their main FTP install directory so a clean install comes out fairly up-to-date. That's cool. But there are other packages on my system that are clearly not up to the latest version compared to the FTP site. But YOU isn't autoselecting them when I run it. It seems when I run YOU I have flip to another console/ ftp to the site YOU is using/check the rpms there/rpm -qa|grep on another console/and manually select the updates in YOU. Am I missing something here? If I have to do the ftp/check/grep thing, then what's the point of YOU? I can download things manually and just do it that way (I'm already FTP'd in, after all). Isn't YOU supposed to help with this in some way, not make the process longer and more painful? Is there a checkbox somewhere I missed? A magic chant, perhaps? Sorry for the long and ranty email. Abject stupidity gets me very frustrated late at night (that includes my own abject stupidity if someone can show me exactly what it is about YOU that makes it in any way useful). Does anyone have any experience with/understanding of this program that would help me make it something other than a complete waste of my time? I'm asking here before submitting a bug to SuSE that simple reads "YOU suck(s)". ;-) Ian
