Don Russell wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
> Anybody else think we're issuing entirely /way/ too many updates?
> We've had 138 "stable" updates, and 177 current "testing"
updates.
> If all those were to go stable, we're talking over 300 updates, in
> just over a week.
>
> Seriously. We're drowning our users in updates. Are all of them
> really necessary? I feel like we've got this culture of update
> whatever/whenever coming from Extras where it was just fire and
> forget. While that might be fun for the maintainer, is it fun for
> the user? Is it fun for the user with a slow connection?
>
I'm a user (of my own system, so also an administrator).... here's my
2 cents...
I don't really care if there is a "flood of updates".... I interpret
it as "people are busy" at making my system better. :-) or adding new
things to make other systems better. :-)
What I *would* like (just started thinking about it) is a procmail
recipe to divide the announcement e-mails into "installed" and "not
installed" packages.
For example... I received an e-mail with this subject:
Fedora 7 Update: xorg-x11-server-1.3.0.0-8.fc7
Thats great... very consistent subject patterns, but from a
programming point of view, how do I know where the program name ends
(so I can use it with an rpm -q command to see if it is installed),
and where the version number starts (so I can compare it with the
results of rpm -q)? It would help is there was a blank between program
name and version number... or even more explicit:
Fedora 7 Update: xorg-x11-server Version: 1.3.0.0-8.fc7
ThenI can easily just grab everything between "Update:" and
"Version:"
for the program name, and everything aftet "Version:" for the version
number.
Ideally, I'll have procmail divide these announcements into three groups:
1 - program is installed and announcement is advising of newer version
(yum should pick those up automatically when the nightly yum runs)
2 - program is installed and already at/beyond the announced version
(i.e yum update beat the announcement)
3 - program is not installed, but I can look at the announcement to
see if it's something I might be interested in
As I started looking into this more, I realized the needed information
(package name, version, etc) are already nicely formatted in the message
body.... so, no need to add a blank in the subject line material. :-)