Boot poster challenge

Dave Jones davej at redhat.com
Tue Nov 16 23:43:50 UTC 2004


On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 06:29:40PM -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
 
 > Utterly. On multihead boxes I've seen it take 30% of the total CPU time
 > and 20% of the network bandwidth. Its eeeeevil because it should be a
 > service daemon so it runs *ONCE* and it should chat over dbus or something
 > to the display which -should-not-flash- - it's very bad UI design (movement
 > out of the user focus area is distracting) and sucks resources.

It also gets 'stuck' sometimes, making the user believe that everything
is up to date, whilst running up2date -l, or yum will find packages
that need updating.  I've also seen it claim updates are available
that running up2date on the command line can't find. *boggle*

The whole thing needs a bullet in its head imo.

I never thought I'd say it, but after having recently bought a
mac for my wife, Apple did something right. They have something
(possibly a cron job) that looks for updates at a user specified
interval, and if nothing is found, it does nothing. You don't even
know it checked.  If it does find something, it pops up a dialog.
None of this flashing red bubble nonsense.  The whole time you're
blissfully unaware of this going on, which is a big win
memory footprint wise.

I've heard from other quarters that even Microsoft's update
notifier is becoming more sensible than ours. They even have
a 'download the updates in the background when things are idle'
option aparently, which sounds cute. (think I'd rather be around
when it applies them though).

 > If someone could have that fixed and in testing tomorrow that would be
 > fantastic ;)

Wouldn't it be great ? They'd be my fedora hero-of-the-day. 

		Dave




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