On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 02:49:32AM +0200, Buchan Milne wrote: > On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Leon Brooks wrote: > > > On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 01:01, Buchan Milne wrote: > > > I think, going back to it, the users would prefer some tool that is > > > more interactive. > > > > Or has that option. > > > > My local (WAIX-visible) Mandrake update mirror broke for circa a day and > > for a day after that urpmi --auto-select wanted to remove > > "inconsequential" things like openssl in order to complete its update. > > One day it might elect to remove, say, RPM or glibc. The only thing I > > can think of that would prevent a non-admin from suicide in that case > > would be a list of "it is not reasonable to remove this" RPM tags, but > > an admin appreciates the confirmation. > > AFAIK, in --auto-select --auto mode, urpmi won't remove packages to > upgrade others, at least that is what appears to be the case, since I very > seldom lose packages, even though I run urpmi --auto-select --auto daily > from cron against a mirror that is very often out of sync. > > But, this new tool would not actually do anything relating to package > installation/removal, it would still let MandrakeUpdate do it, it would > just alert the user as to when they should run it, and make it easier to > launch.
I would appreciate a new tool like Buchan describes - an applet available in the panel indicating whether the system is fully updated or not and a corresponding daemon checking the status every some minutes (this is already there in competing products like RH and Windows). However, I would also very much like an option during install to automatically install updates, and do it in a secure way so that if there be errors in the mirror that it would not corrupt my system. I do run urpmi --auto-select --auto out of cron.daily on my system, which amongst other things is a mandrake mirror and web and ftp server. I would very much appreciate a way that is easy for the novice and also secure to do that and also very easy to set up (possibly the default or something that you just select one place in the service selection like a update service). Something like 80 % of all installations do not install security patches, and I would like to bring that figure considerably down. Could be that it should only be security fixes that be installed, if that could reduce the risk of damaging the system, but my preference would be to automatically keep the system updated, in a secure way (foolproof). Maybe both options could be available (in an expert state, so you could chose whether it would be everything that got updated, or just security fixes. Making it all happen quickly with only deltas of the hdlist needing to be transferred as Leon describes it with gzip addandas would be a bonus. I think that there is a need to explicitely delete old packages in the deltas, as there may be more versions of the same package that are valid. that would mean a specific record to say "rm package" - but I may be wrong there and just superceding an old package with a newer one with a higher version number may be secure enough. Keld
