On Wednesday 16 July 2003 10:24, Ben Reser wrote: > On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 07:01:06PM +0200, Buchan Milne wrote: > The problem with doing this interactively is how? fpons suggested > putting MandrakeUpdate on xinit.d... That assumes the user logs in and > out of X on a regular basis. So let's say we put something on a cron > that looks for updates, pops up and says hey there are updates. Which > user should we display that for?
All users in a special group. At low security, this is everyone. At medium security, this is the msec admin. At high security, or expert install, whoever's installing needs to know what a group is and deal with it. This would be roughly equivalent to the system on Windows XP (except when installing on an NT/2K domain, where it gets more complicated and essentially doesn't work). My mother and sister share a computer, and they see the fact that whichever one of them is logged in can see and install the updates as a good thing. >> This assumes users are logging in and out of X on a regular basis. On >> many of my machines I don't for months at a time... > > But you are capable of writing a cron job to do it for you, which is why > you don't even need such a tool. There are many users who are not capable of writing a cron job, and who also stay logged in for weeks on end. The fact that you can do just this--that you almost never have to log out, much less reboot--is one of the selling points for converting to linux. If we tell people that they have to log out and back in periodically to check for updates, that won't sound good: "Oh, so linux is just like Windows, they just try to hide it better." Buchan: > Remember that most of the time it should be running as a normal user, > and thus should not run 'urpmi.update' or anything else that requires > elevated priveleges. The automated update system is useless if there's nothing automatically running urpmi.update every so often. Maybe this should be installed as a weekly cron job for users who specify an "always on" connection, as an ifup script (that does nothing unless it's been more than, e.g., 6 days since last time) for those who specify a "dialup" connection? Whatever, it should be almost completely invisible to novice users. Buchan: >> Has no-one on this list installed Redhat recently? Ben: > Why would I want to? To steal their best ideas--and, more importantly, to avoid their worst mistakes. As for how to download and install packages, it might be nice to pre-download them (as XP does). (What if there are multiple users? Provide a directory under /var/tmp or something which all users have write access to, and download them there.) However, it's probably easier and safer to have MandrakeUpdate download the packages on demand (as root).
