[packagekit] Question / Suggestion

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 11:39 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> > My main question would be: why do you need to use it?
> 
> While many wide deployments use local package caches and possibly
> local repos, many single deployments are hosted in locations with poor
> network links. See below.
> 
> > Packagekit is designed around several loose use-cases, so if you can
> > find a use case for this functionality (other than "it's cool" :-) then
> > we can start talking about how we can add the functionality to
> > PackageKit to fulfil the use case.
> 
> Joe works as a sysop in a small company. He has to manage Jane's
> computer but no enterprise-grade remote administration tools are
> available. He does not want Jane to install software on her own but
> the poor DSL link means each visit to her desk

Wouldn't her desk have a ethernet cable with a local mirror of updates?
In that case the downloading takes a few seconds, not hours.

> takes up to several
> hours if a new version of OpenOffice is available. He'd like to
> configure PackageKit to automatically download packages when the
> computer is idle but stop the installation until he comes by and
> cherry-picks the updates.

Why not just have the policy set to automatically install updates? If
the admin wants that sort of super stability control over what packages
should be updated then they want to use something like RHEL and the rhn
thing they've got.

> Rachel uses a mixed plan for her phone line. This means she has free
> internet access between 10 PM and 10 AM. As she uses an unstable
> distribution line, she'd like PackageKit to download the updates
> overnight and let her install the software the next afternoon, when
> she gets home.

Sure, sensible. But wouldn't Rachel also want the updates to be done in
the middle of the night too?

Richard.