Lack of update information

[Ralf Corsepius]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 01:22 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>  The problem with this: Users don't notice the cases in which upgrades 
>> "simply work" - They only notice the case, something already has gone wrong.
> 
> Many users notice a plethora of updates for unknown reasons that chew up
> their bandwidth, cpu, and disk time while they're just trying to get
> work done.  So much so that many opt out of applying updates at all,
> because there are so many of them, which hurts our abilities to deliver
> security updates.

These problems do not originate from the number of upgrades/update, they 
originate from the _size_ of updates few packages introduce.

> People in bandwidth rich situations 
Correct.

> and with new expensive fast hardware
> may not see a problem. 

Well, I would label this an urban legend - Updating recent Fedoras using 
yum has not been much of a performance problem, even on slower and older 
HW (e.g. a 1GHz i686/512MB)

Admitted, on an 64MB/166MHz i586 w/Fedora 10 yum updates tend to be 
"really slow".

However, wrt. to bandwidth, I see another problem: Your strategy of 
pushing updates in "big batches", instead of "small chunks".

This makes a significant difference to users with limited bandwidth. 
While they could easily poll "small chunks", e.g. once a day (blocking 
their network for, e.g. 1 hour), the current strategy would block they 
network for very much longer (e.g. 7 hours).

Another aspect related to bandwidth: Revisiting
* the sizes of rpms (e.g. different payload compressors).
* differential updates/rpms.

Seems to me as if these once "hot topics" have dropped off the Fedora 
radar, in favor of "strangling/nagging the distro's contributors".

Ralf