Please Cc me on replies, I'm not subscribed (I'd have you Cc apt-watch-devel as well, but alioth's mailing lists seem to be dead)
On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 10:28:42AM -0500, Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > Content-Description: Messaggio inoltrato - Re: Debian-update Gnome applet > > I'm not logged in as root, so this must be solved in some way. I can't > > run apt-get update. Aptitude only loads the current cache, so it will > > never find any updates without me manually run apt-get update. And what > > is the point then. When updates are available it should popup som > > authentication dialog to allow me to do updates from my user account. > > It can; double-click on the applet when updates are available or look > at the Preferences dialog. I should add that you can also make /usr/lib/apt-watch/apt-watch-slave SUID root, in which case it will manage the global apt cache. This is NOT recommended, because while I do run a clearenv() if the slave is suid, and I have tried to make the slave as secure as possible, there may be lurking security holes in the slave or libapt. > > So how could this be done? I don't know but wouldn't it be possible to > > download the package-lists according to the global-apt preferenses and > > compare them to the installed packages? I guess that might be quite alot > > of work though... :-/ > > That's what it does. Specifically: it copies newer package lists from the system directory to your home directory, then runs the equivalent of an "apt-get update" using the lists in your home directory. When you select the "run package manager" option or double-click the applet (when upgrades are available), it asks for the root password, then copies the lists and any packages that it downloaded back to the appropriate system directories. > > It should not be an applet but a small daemon that registers with the > > session-manager using the notification-area to indicate when stuff are > > available for download. The preferenses should be installed as a > > separate applet (like the control-center struff). > > I don't understand this paragraph. Well, except that it appears to be talking about a program that just starts in the notification area. An additional UI should be fairly straightforward to add: all the mechanism of the program is in UI-independent backend code (actually separated into another process), and for a notification-area applet I could probably reuse some of the Gnome applet code. There isn't a notification-area applet right now because a Gnome applet is superior for my personal use, and I wanted to start with the UI that I would want to use. Plus, the notification-area only lets you show an icon IIRC, so it's not really an option until I have icons to show. (it's also not obvious how to create a notification-area applet...although I don't suppose the documentation could possibly be worse than that for the Gnome libraries) The notification area also has the downside that you could only run one instance of the applet at once (the Gnome panel makes it possible for several copies of the same applet to have different option settings -- I'm not sure this actually works yet, but it's at least a theoretical possibility) and that the applet wouldn't automatically be remembered for the next time you log in. Since I've had several requests for this, I assume there are people who don't mind the drawbacks, but it was as much as I could do to get one UI put together for the first release. (it's always possible to hack around these drawbacks by managing multiple copies of the apt-watch notification-area program myself, of course, but it would be fairly tedious and the panel manages this automatically for me) The "daemon" notion does give me one interesting idea, though. Right now, each applet runs a separate copy of the slave process; it might be worthwhile to allow multiple applets to connect to the same slave. That would avoid a problem that currently exists (multiple monitors on the same computer run by the same user don't play together very nicely). Communication could take place, eg, via a UNIX filesystem socket in ~/.apt-watch. I think this would be fairly easy to add as an extension to the current program. I suppose you could also create a global daemon that anyone could connect to, but that makes me a bit uneasy. (my confusion earlier was partly caused by the fact that you seemed to be suggesting this) Daniel -- /-------------------- Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -------------------\ | "We've got nothing to fear but the stuff that we're | | afraid of!" -- Fluble | \-Evil Overlord, Inc: planning your future today. http://www.eviloverlord.com-/
