[packagekit] running without a head via cron

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 08:27:10PM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> I've got no probs with that. if you come up with a retval table of
> numbers we can do this trivially.

I'll take a look and put together something nice.

> > That's one level of it. The next level is: if we were unplugged from the
> >  network for three hours, we probably don't want to complain. If we're
> >  unplugged for a day, maybe we want to make a little bit of noise. If we're
> >  unable to get updates for a week, we want to be louder about it. But at the
> >  same time, we don't want to annoy people with a storm of messages.
> Hmm. sounds too configurable to me...

I'm confident it can be made to do basically the right thing without
configuration.

Probably the cleanest way is to just log network failures and exit silently
if we're reasonably certain that's the cause of the problem, and make
something else notice those messages and attempt to tell someone about them.


> > The problem is there's a lot of potentially useful data. Even
> >  packagename + old version + new version is straining what one can fit
> >  on an 80-character line.
> Who said it had to be on one line?

Putting info on multiple lines is an option, but that makes it hard to scan.


> > Origin repository is pretty vital too, although perhaps one can group
> >  packages into lists per repo, making that a sub-header rather than a column.
> Wow, that's far too much detail for a simple command. We can parse the
> output later if we want.

I can't see what of the detail is discardable, though. I've gotten specific
complaints about yum-updatesd's output being "useless".

> >  > PackageKit can't ask the backend to only update from certain repos, as
> >  > that would imply it could do it's own dependancy resolution. You can
> >  > however ask PackageKit to disable a repo, do the update then enable a
> >  > repo -- I think that would do what you require.
> > Yep, that'd be fine. But adding stuff like that gets more and more
> >  complicated in a shell script.
> pkcon repo disable livna

Where do you configure that? How does the shell script interact with that
configuration?

One clean way would be to do it in the .repo files specifically, with a
config option like autoupdate=[(yes|all)|(no|none)|securityonly|notifyonly]
but I don't know how that'd work with PackageKit.

> > At this point, the python client library seems a bit more complicate than
> >  that. :)
> Suure. Maybe you could come up with a list of nice-to-haves and then
> i'll iimpliment the sane ones. ;-)

Thanks. Although if your definition of "sane" ends up being to small to be
functional.... :)

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>