[CentOS-devel] Re: CentOS Errata

Wed Sep 5 14:25:56 UTC 2007
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

Kevan Benson wrote:
> A side venture of mine.  A centralized heterogeneous update notification 
> system.  Instead of listing package names, it links directly to the OS's 
> supplied errata page, condensing multiple packages to the single errata the 
> references them.  Email me off list if you want more info than that.

Could you not achieve the same result with a yum plugin that just displays the 
update portion of a package changelog, along with its name and version when you 
ask for a 'yum list updates'?

> There may not be a need, but it is very nice to be able to go to your OS 
> vendor's web page and search for anything that might affect your system, or 
> for info regarding a specific package and actually have information 
> available.

We have spoken about this a few times, in various forums, and there really isnt 
  a sane mechanism to get package list, machine state, extra non-rpm apps and 
other security related info from a machine - tunel it out over a secure link 
into ( for example ) a centos mirror network, and then give the user feedback on 
whats due and what the relevent errata state for the machine is -> unless we 
adopt a rhn like ( or redcarpnet / zenworks like ) agent process. Call me odd, 
but at this stage I am not all that keen on implementing something of that nature.

> I'll admit, it does fit my above stated goal, but that's not the only reason I 
> think it's worthwhile.  Every other enterprise OS has their errata listed 
> online.  CentOS seems to be in the somewhat unique situation of having an 
> upstream provider that has most the errata listed, so there's been less of a 
> drive for this.

not sure I understand, http://lists.centos.org/ has a list you can get to via a 
webbrowser and even search around there for info if you like.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq