I wish the distributors would use it (or at least be friendly to it) rather than these proprietary update hacks like YOU or RHN. It'd save them a hell of a lot of bandwidth.
Even more important than intercompany bandwidth is the ability to control what software is going to come to you. We control our own (APT) repository and we decide when new code is promoted to the 'stable' repository, which happens after testing and when we want the servers to use it. Automatic upgrade in that case is very feasable. This means there will not be any surprises when you upgrade the server to the latest code. If you upgrade from a public update repository managed by someone else you can never tell whether the next server upgrade will be the same as the previous one. Yes, I know you get prompted with a list of 387 pkgs, but I rather control it at some other point in time.
When the distributor would not use proprietary tools for their maintenance, it would be trivial for someone else to grab their distribution and sell maintenance on top of it using the distributor's tools like YOU or up2date. I want to believe such issues is also why the re-packaging of SuSE rpm's like k_deflt is so cumbersome.
Rob
