On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 08:42:17AM -0400, RavenLX wrote:
On 05/14/2017 04:03 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:On Fri, May 05, 2017 at 04:32:44PM +0000, sarez45@att.net wrote:Why doesn't Debian 8 Cinnamon notify when updates are ready to install after all these years Debian has existed? Don't tell me there is one, because after installing Debian I waited a long time to see if a notification would pop up. It never did. I know about doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade,but why should we have to use a command line? It makes me wonder about Debian security. Would you please put an update notifier in all your versions of Debian.Who do you think you are talking to?LOL! Love your reply! :)I love that Debian doesn't have an updater/notifier. I rather do things at the command line. I'd be lost without it.
You make it sound as though the two are incompatible. Long ago, people developed mail notifications and I see no reason that update notifications couldn't be done the same way. At a pure-commandline level, you could print "There are $num new updates available." This could be restricted to either the superuser or perhaps to members of the sudo group. Another option would be a tmux/byobu/powerline widget which displays something like "📦$num" (where 📦 is U+1F4E6 "Package")
Also, updaters/notifiers I've found don't always pop up the extra information some updates may have (which you would have to read and sometimes interact with to make a decision of whether to keep a config file or not, or to reconfig something.).
There's a difference between update notifications (which would natually limit themselves to "There are new updates" / "There are X new updates" / "The following packages have updates ...") and unattended upgrades. Unattended upgrades do, it's true, need some special consideration. Changelogs/news can be mailed to root through the correct configuration of apt-listchanges. apt-listbugs should clearly conflict, though; you can't screen for bugs if there's no-one to choose if the bugs are important or not. And as for debconf issues, I'm fairly certain that the debconf/conffiles/ucf stuff CAN be made to work automatically, but I think it needs either an alert admin to check for *.dpkg-new files or perhaps some sort of email alert telling the admin that there are pending changes. I played around with gentoo a while ago and I seem to remember that they had a tool for that which would walk through the conffiles and upon finding a new version from the package would patch it. Conflicts could be merged interactively. Debian SORT of has this, but as far as I'm aware it currently only handles it at package upgrade time.
If the OP want Debian with a notifier, maybe they should try a Debian-based distro rather than pure Debian. There's tons of them out there. They could check out distrowatch.com for more info.Personally, I'm glad Debian doesn't notify automatically by default.
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