Automatic and silent installation of security updates

Till Varoquaux till.varoquaux at gmail.com
Mon Jul 11 10:05:41 CDT 2005


I sent this before.... just not to the mailling list:
No the kernel is diffenitly something you would *not* want to be upgradded 
without knowing because:
_You could have drivers you compilled for yourselves. Those won't work with 
the new kernel wihout being recompilled and might leave you with an usable 
system.
_You could use an external bootloader which needs updating (suppose you have 
a dual boot with lilo managed by the other bootable system...)
_A whole lot of other reasons.
If someone wants to implement this feature you must take great care of 
upgradding only want should be upgarded (breaking binary compatibility is a 
no-no for instance).
So I'm not against upgradding silently but a think there should be at least 
three level the user can choose from:
_None (nope I don't want this).
_No breakage of binary cmpatibility (I have my stuff compilled by me and 
will be very pissed if I wake up one morning and find it doesn't work any 
more)
_Full fledge.
Till
On 7/11/05, Ewan Mac Mahon <ewan at macmahon.me.uk> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 04:15:58PM +0200, Martijn van de Streek wrote:
> > On Fri, 08 Jul 2005, Wouter Stomp wrote:
> >
> 
> > > About the kernel, I don't think that should be silently upgraded 
> either.
> >
> I don't think there's a problem with automatically installing new
> kernels; only if the grub default changes to the new one. Updates on
> RedHat, for example, point the default at the old kernel until you
> change it manually.
> 
> > How should an upgrade-tool distinguish between kernels and other
> > packages?
> >
> There's some kernel spotting logic in apt somewhere already to make it
> object if you try to remove the package of the running kernel so it
> might be possible to use that.
> 
> Ewan
> 
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