On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mi...@bga.com> wrote: >>> Do we really want to be running something like update which (I assume) >>> takes significant resources without consulting with the user? >> >> Yes! Remember, these are not designed as normal laptops. They are for >> young children and for use in schools. The only time to do updates is >> when the child is at school, connected to the school server, and if >> updates are not fully automatic then they simply will not happen. > > In an endeavor *completely* removed from OLPC (or the XO), I've had > a long-standing philosophy difference - I'm a "hands on" guy - and > they don't want to facilitate that. Now with regard to automatic > updates, the same philosophy difference is showing up with the XO: > > Wiki page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Update_streams describes how by > specifying 'none' as the update-stream value, updates are supposed > to be "never update me" (automatically). Yet, despite me always > having 'none' in /security/update-stream -- in 2007/2008 if I > entered 'top' I all too frequently saw 'olpc-update-query' using > system resources (uselessly, because it was unable to get through my > proxy back to any server). [I do updating with manual commands.] > > Please -- do run your automatic updates to your heart's content. > But if a non-child XO user like me has specified 'none' -- DON'T run > automatic updates.
Mikus: olpc-update-query should be launching, seeing your 'none' stream, and immediately exiting. It's just a software maintenance issue that it launches at all; cron doesn't allow conditionals in crontab. I don't have the source handy, but I suspect I implemented 'none' server side just to avoid cluttering up the client code with special cases, but I'm sure a patch would be accepted to do early exit on 'none' if you'd like to write one. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel