What is broken with software update?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2015 21:44:39 -0400, John Mellor wrote:

> My recalled experience has been that the
> Gnome updater is not finding even 5-day-old updates, but assuming that
> some weird preferred repo out there is totally broken, I'm willing to
> test that thesis.

A fundamental problem is that everything is focused on the master repo
only, which is not supposed to be the primary place from where to download
the updates. Announcements of updates are sent as soon as stuff has been
published in the master repo. Update system ticket state details reflect
whether an update has been published in that repo, but _not_ whether it is
available to everyone via the world-wide mirrors.

You read about an update, but the package updater tools don't "see" the
update yet, because they examine nearby mirrors and may only get access to
older repo contents that way. It can take hours (or days even) for mirrors
to sync with the master repo *and* end up in a usable state (i.e. not
cause 404 Not Found errors for packages that have not been mirrored yet,
for example).

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/4866

is only the tip of the iceberg. The burden of choosing a mirror from the
list of advertised mirrors has been put onto the shoulders of the
developers of repo metadata downloaders. They need to decide themselves
whether to do "expensive" mirror crawling, for example, in search of a
nearby mirror that is up-to-date, complete and usable, too.