[Yum] Suggestion for yum's rpm

[Carlos Villegas]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 01:44:20PM -0400, Elliot Peele wrote:
> I was just wondering why you would need to change yum.cron. If your
> going to change it in the same way on all of your machines why not just
> build your own rpm?

I need to change yum.cron, since we don't want the systems to update 
anything without our knowledge (and consent). The reasons for this
are obvious to us, since it has already happened to us a few times:
an update comes out (normally a kernel will be the trouble maker),
and after applying the update, something (very important) will break.
We need to avoid this, and we avoid it by updating the systems when
we are ready for it, not when some cron job runs. 

We could do: /sbin/chkconfig --level 123456 yum off 
And we do. However this isn't the only thing. In particular we are
interested in running a daily "update report", so we want to
preserve the cronjob, but it will run "yum check-update" instead
of "yum update".

It is true that this change could be done on our own rpm, however
this would fix it for us, not the world. I just "happened" to notice that
that the cronjob was overwritten when updating yum, and took immediate
corrective action. Someone else might not be that lucky ;)

To me the fact that I would be forced to roll out my own rpm to be 
able to properly configure yum on our network means that the
package is flawed (not yum, just the rpm). Since I really like yum,
and I doubt I'm the only one that wants to modify the yum.cron file.
I decided to make the suggestion and start this whole thread.
It's more a philosophical thing :) (giving back to the community).

In fact, if you haven't done it, take a look at yum's mailing list
archives, and see that I'm not the only one messing around with that
file. I also like the idea of the /etc/yum.cron.conf (just in case
I haven't mentioned it).

My other suggestion of splitting yum into two rpms would also fix the
problem (but is overkill). If you want automatic updating you install
yum-service, or not if you don't. There are two "semantically"
different things packed onto the same rpm (1. the tools, 2. the
update service). I don't think that's necessarily bad though...

Carlos