Daniel Palmer daniel-at-cardboardbox.org.uk |volatile-lists| wrote:
Jamming dist-upgrade into a cron job will cause problems when a package
doesn't upgrade cleanly.. for example mysql is getting upgraded, the
server will stop and not come back up. Even worse if a kernel upgrade
doesn't create the initrd correctly.. basically too much is going on and
someone should be checking on it.
But that could be a problem also with just plain "apt-get upgrade",
couldn't it? In both these cases apt-get will fail and $? will be set to
non-zero, at least in my experience. That would work fine for me, since
it allows me to detect an error situation.
I don't think apt is meant to be automated. Updating package lists and
pre-caching the packages you'll need later with cron-apt speeds things
up though. The best option would be to use one of the applications other
people have mentioned to *manage* mass updates. The ideal solution is to
sit down once a week, manage an update and have the result propagate to
your machines. Looking at the screenshots, fai seems to do exactly this.
RHEL has a web-based system that does exactly the same but at a price. :P
By looking at the source code for "fai softupdate", I can see that in
the end, it ends up calling
"""
export aptopt=
$ROOTCMD apt-get $aptopt -f -y dist-upgrade </dev/null
"""
So I guess "fai softupdate" will have exactly the same shortcomings as
putting "apt-get -f -y dist-upgrade" in a script. Then I might as well
do that.
Ok, guys, I thank you for your suggestions. I just thought I had
misunderstood something and that "there had to be a better way". It
seems there isn't.
Its apt-get upgrade and live with the kept-back packages or dist-upgrade
and deal with the potential "package breakage" - whatever that means...
Peter
--
Peter Valdemar Mørch
http://www.morch.com
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