[ubuntu-za] Updates

[Bill Cairns]

Ja well no fine. I hope that you took my mail in the spirit that it was sent
;).

I suppose that my problem is, and my concern is, that Ubuntu is beginning to
adopt the Nanny philosophy that drove me away from loving Microsoft in the
first place. Yes, support for Exchange is probably a good thing (let's
undermine them from within as well as from without) but nine tenths of us -
nine hundred and ninety nine thousandths of us - will never want to
integrate with an  Exchange server. Surely, support for an Exchange server
is only going to be a couple of clicks away in Synaptic anyway, so why
inflict the pain on all of us?

We have another example lately in Evolution demanding a password for an
encryption file. Good security if we are going to use encryption. But the
same 9999/10000 of us don't mind if you publish our email on the Internet.
So why ask for the password on a file that is completely empty?

I also run Ubuntu on a very old and ancient Dell machine and have struggled
to improve its performance by stopping it running (and updating) anything it
does not need. That means uninstalling a huge amount of stuff that (in my
ignorant and very humble opinion) should not be there in the first place.

As I said, Ja well no fine.



On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 8:16 PM, Jonathan Carter <jonathan at ubuntu.com>wrote:

> Hi Bill
>
> Bill Cairns wrote:
> > I religiously and uncritically apply all the updates to my system.
> > Lately there seem to be lots of them. Too many lots.
> >
> > Today I noticed that there was a security update to the Evolution
> > Exchange Connector. Huh?
> >
> > I need the Exchange Connector so that I can integrate with MS Exchange?
> > I need Microsoft Exchange so that I can ... Well I can't remember.
> >
> > Will someone explain why I need to correct a potential security flaw in
> > the Exchange Connector when I will use Exchange when I finally get
> > senile and buy into a Microsoft world view of mediocre is king?
>
> If I understand correctly, you're not connecting to an Exchange server,
> and you would like to know why you require an update for a connector
> you'll never use.
>
> The connector is probably shipped by default with Evolution, since
> Exchange support is probably an advertised feature. Ubuntu's update
> manager doesn't check whether you use a package or not before
> downloading and installing an update, it checks whether a package is
> installed. If there is a newer package available for any installed
> package, update manager will offer to install the newer version.
>
> What it comes down to, is that update-manager did not mean to insult you
> or suggest that you are connecting to an Exchange server. You can
> prevent this update from bothering you again by removing the
> evolution-exchange package :)
>
> -Jonathan
>
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