[packagekit] Question / Suggestion

[Patryk Zawadzki]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 12:39 PM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 11:39 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
>> 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.

Not necessarily, small companies often have very limited hardware. If
they can't afford an enterprise-grade link, they probably don't have
the hardware needed to host local mirrors. These are the companies
that choose Linux for its cost, not for its superior desktop
experience.

>> 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.

See above. It's all about the money.

>> 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?

Not if she's on an unstable distro line.

-- 
Patryk Zawadzki
PLD Linux Distribution