The updates firehose
Don Russell
fedora at drussell.dnsalias.com
Tue Jun 12 01:31:15 UTC 2007
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
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