On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:54:25PM -0500, Sam Hooker wrote: | Is anyone using it? For what? We monitor for critical package updates | (where they're not automated for whatever reason) with a home-grown Nagios | plugin. Is YUM/RSS cool for some reason I can't identify?
If the question "is RSS cool?", emphatic yes. It's the best thing since HTML, which is itself many times better than sliced bread. If it's "is [package changelogs] over RSS cool?", it depends. I used to subscribe to Gentoo's updated-package feed, but it had too low of a signal/noise ratio for me. A variation of "updated versions of packages that you have installed" might be valuable ... seeing a new feature or change in that list might encourage me to upgrade immediately, rather than at the next "natural" upgrade point. It sounds like that yum option is to basically provide that feed for a particular system, which you could then easily get into a feed aggregator. For a human consumer, it may or may not be better. I'm going to see the update within a week anyways, when I next update all installed software. But if software or script is the feed consumer, it might be more useful. If the alternative is for the nagios plugin (or whatever) to screen-scrape updates out of HTML, then parsing an RSS feed is a clear win. If the software is already getting it's updates from structured content (e.g. some application-specific XML, that, say `svn log --xml` would generate or even formatted stdout of yum itself), then it's probably not a big win. OTOH, by using the generic format, the checker can be made more general purpose, to look for content in any RSS feed... The generic RSS parser would poll the feed for changes and ensure that the software only had uniquely new items to process, and the software check could be specifically about looking for the thing (package name, version number, "critical bug fix" in the feature list, &c.) of interest to notify about. But if there are no other feeds to check, then there's probably not a win in doing that. -- ...jsled http://asynchronous.org/jsled/ | `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
