How do I enable nightly yum?

[John Summerfied]

Rick Stevens wrote:

> 
>> I would have thought a daily (or rather nightly) cron job
>> running "yum -y update" would be what most people would want,
>> at least on a desktop.
> 
> 
> Yes, that's one way.  Don't forget to do "yum -y update >/dev/null 2>&1"
> unless you want mail sent to root everytime it runs.

I think running yum to automatically update your is a particularly 
effective way of getting your system screwed without you knowing why,

Diverting all the output to /dev/null compounds the problem because it 
discards some of the evidence.

How likely is it that a particular update is broken?
	Quite low, but not impossible.
How likely is it that there will be a serious problem with an updated?
	Almost certain.

There has been a recent kernel update providing a kernel that does not 
work on some systems. On mine, it would not shut down cleanly so I was 
forced to cycle power (no reset button) to reboot. Others had problems 
booting. Worse, the new-kernel policy is the latest-installed is the 
default.

glibc and rpm both have the ability to bork the entire system.

I have no problem with running a tool to download updates regularly, but 
I _will not_ apply them automatically. I do it manually so that then I 
know something's changed.

up2date has the ability to download and _not_ apply updates: I did that 
on taroon beta.
apt-get has the ability to download and _not_ apply updates. I do that 
on my several Debian systems.

yum has not this ability and so IMV is ill-suited to the task of 
maintaining one's software where automation is desired.






-- 

Cheers
John

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