Why there are updates in yum that are not announced?

[Jorge Fábregas]

On Thursday 25 November 2004 11:38 pm, William Lovaton wrote:
> I wonder why I can see some updates in yum but I can't find the
> appropriate announcement in the fedora-announce mailing list nor in
> fedoranews.org??

Hi,

This is a question that many people ask here. Then answer is that usually 
announcements are sent a couple of days later after the packages are placed 
in the proper repository. This is to allow all mirrors to get synced so that 
when then announcement is made people will find it in their respective 
configured mirrors.

Think about it, the other option will be to make the announcement just after 
the first package is placed in redhat.com and then you'll see every user 
trying to get the updates on their mirrors...since probably it's not already 
synced...users will come here and ask why can't they see the package.

> For example gamin, I can't find the update info about it.  Is it safe to
> update?

Well, there seems to be an exception here. By looking at the modification time 
for the gamin package (redhat site) you can tell it was placed on Nov 19 
which is about a week ago. I don't know, maybe they just forgot about this 
announcement.  Usually they'll send the announcemnt one or two days after the 
updates are uploaded.

However, you can always download the package and query the rpm metadata 
(specifically the changelog) to see what's the update for.  In this case,  
you can download the package and type this:

rpm -qp --changelog gamin-0.0.17-1.FC3.i386.rpm

You'll see the latest entry:
--------------------------------------------------------
* Fri Nov 12 2004 Daniel Veillard <veillard at redhat.com> 0.0.17-1.FC3
- more #132354 chasing and cleanups
- fix of #135417
-------------------------------------------------------

You can tell it contain fixes for bugs #132354 & #135417 which you can search 
for on bugzilla.redhat.com.  

Then you may decide wheter you need this update or not (without needing to 
look at the announcement email) which in fact contains the latest update from 
the package's changelog.

HTH,
Jorge