Missing PackageKit notification in GNOME Shell

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 25 May 2011 20:51:02 +0100, RH wrote:

> The update gsettings plugin is solely responsible for getting updates
> and every hour it checks to see if the frequency-get-updates has been
> exceeded. If this is exceeded, it does an updates check with
> packagekitd. If there are critical updates then a notification is
> issued straight away, otherwise a notification is shown only when the
> frequency-updates-notification value has elapsed. That's also set to
> one week in gsettings and there's no UI to change that. What that
> means in reality is that if there are no critical or security updates
> then you only get notified of updates just once a week. That was a
> requirement from the design team to reduce the number of pesky
> notifications when there's nothing actually wrong,

Thanks for the explanation!

This design decision has shielded me from many test updates after the F15
Alpha/Beta release. :-/ 

One week is much too long for the typical tester/packager behaviour in
bodhi and the download mirror lag. I would be informed too late about the
availability of pkgs in the updates-testing repo. Early notifications are
better. The UI settings being non-intuitive (and the "Help" not giving the
background you've given here) hasn't been helpful. I would have preferred a
much lower "frequency-updates-notification" value during the last weeks of
F15 development.

Good that I've been busy/occupied with other stuff and haven't checked for
updates manually often during the week. But to find lots of updates and
changed repo metadata, whenever I've used Yum, has forced me several times
to deal with the new packages and various forms of breakage at
inappropriate times. Not limited to yum-builddep on x86_64 running into
dependency errors and trying to install hundreds of i686 packages. Or
installed packages from updates-testing being newer than what is still
found in the repos.