what has 'yum update' done?

lee lee at yun.yagibdah.de
Sat Jul 13 22:51:05 UTC 2013


Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> writes:

> On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 03:34:18PM +0200, lee wrote:
>> The package management tools in Debian send you emails about changes
>> like that, even about very little changes, when packages are being
>> replaced by more recent versions.  Maybe this could be done in Fedora as
>> well?
>
> You could try using yum-cron.

Automatic updates?  I'd rather not do that since it sometimes seems
advisable to reboot after an update.

> Or, if you're interested in hacking a little
> bit, you could adapt
> ftp://linst.bu.edu/updates/monde/SRPMS/bulinux-autoupdate-1.1.8-bu50.7.src.rpm
> which I made for Boston University Linux back in the day. It would be kind
> of cool to see it made more generic (and possibly integrated with yum-cron).
> It's designed to give a sysadmin-friendly e-mail report of all packages
> updates.

It's not simply about knowing which packages have been or are to be
updated --- that I can see when running 'yum update'.  It's about
information what has actually changed when a package was updated.

For example, you would get a mail like this:


,----
| From: root <root at yun.yagibdah.de>
| Subject: apt-listchanges: news for yun
| To: root at yun.yagibdah.de
| Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2012 22:02:28 +0100
| 
| tmux (1.7~svn2819-1) experimental; urgency=low
| 
|   The server protocol version was changed from 6 to 7, we recommend that
|   you close any open tmux sessions before proceeding with the upgrade.
| 
|  -- Romain Francoise <rfrancoise at debian.org>  Wed, 30 May 2012 19:52:56 +0200
| 
`----


Of course, you get the mail only after the package was updated.
Nonetheless I think it's a great idea, and it would be really cool to
see Fedora (and other distributions) adopt it.

The package maintainer knows what changed, and it doesn't hurt to add a
short note like this when they're making a new version of a package.  In
case there was a bigger change, the email could always suggest what
documentation to look at.

The user/admin receiving the mail knows right away what they may need to
look into.  It is way better than being left in the dark and suddenly
finding out that something doesn't work and having to try to figure out
what's going on.

What would you rather have: Users being told something like "Apache has
been upgraded and the configuration has changed ..." --- or users being
like "Oh crap, my web server doesn't respond anymore!  What did Fedora
break this time?" :)

Why not make it one of the great features of Fedora?  Then take it to
the next step and make systemd send mails in case a service couldn't be
started or has issues, and optionally have it send a mail after booting
has completed with a list of services that were started.


-- 
Fedora release 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat)


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