[Yum] Suggestion for yum's rpm

Elliot Peele ebpeele2 at pams.ncsu.edu
Thu Jun 26 20:21:15 UTC 2003


On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 14:12, Carlos Villegas wrote:
> 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. 

I can understand wanting to have it behave in this way, but I'm guessing
from this that you are just rsyncing the Red Hat updates and letting
your machines update. What we do here is maintain our own tree so that
this doesn't happen. We test Red Hat updates and then add them to the
updates directory, this way our machines don't break. In our case
pushing out kernel errata for example requires us to rebuild packages
such as openAFS that depend on kernel version, so it would be a bad idea
to just blindly apply Red Hat updates.

> 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".

You could recompile the package to do this so that you don't have to
change it on every machines separately.

> 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).

What about the people that would rather have it without the (noreplace)
that would then have to rebuild the rpm to take it out?

> 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).

I don't think this is really the way to go, it just seems like a bad
idea, maybe its just because no one else does 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...

Again...you don't see other rpms do this.


In looking through some of the spec files for Red Hat packages that put
files in /etc/cron.daily it seems to vary. For me personally I would
rather it not be set as noreplace, but I modify the package already it
wouldn't be a big thing to just remove it.

Elliot
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