[Yum] Re: pkgpolicy

Rick Graves gravesricharde at yahoo.com
Mon Sep 6 20:32:54 UTC 2004


Hello Seth,

You wrote:

> Right now pkgpolicy doesn't do anything and I'm
unclear on the best way to sort that one out. I'm
still working on the details there.

Would it be feasible to implement an option "after n
days", where n is an integer that your can specify in
the yum.conf file?  I suggested this some weeks back. 
The idea is to apply an update only after it has been
up there for some days (ten would be an example)
without any superceding update.  

On one hand, YUM is great because it can automate
updating systems, but on the other hand, some
administrators maintain that production servers should
never be updated automatically -- the risk of a glitch
bringing a server down is too big.  Waiting some days
could bring the risk to an acceptable level for
servers running on common hardware without any
customized packages (i.e., for most servers).  

I realize that implementing this option might make
things somewhat more complicated.  Since this option
is to facilitate automatic updates, yum could assume
that it is being run daily.  Along with all the other
metadata, yum could store when it first found each
specific package version.  But yum would neet to know
both about the older version still installed on the
system and about the newer version up on the mirror. 
Keeping the meta data in a flat file format might or
might not be adequate the job.  If not, for this
option, it would be necessary to keep the meta data in
a relational database such as MySQL.  MySQL or other
relational database would make it easy to fetch the
recent revision history on each package.  

Since I am basically a database person, I tend to see
a database solution to every problem.  (Sort of like
if the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, then
you use a hammer to fix everything.)  If you would
consider implementing this and need help with the
database aspects, I would be happy to volunteer.  

Thanks again for YUM.  

Rick Graves



More information about the Yum mailing list