Re: Announcing apt-watch: a Gnome 2 panel applet to check for upgrades
On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 11:04:23AM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 04:41:28PM +0100, Emile van Bergen <emile-deb@evbergen.xs4all.nl> was heard to say:
> > On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 10:24:17AM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> >
> > Whatever you do, don't do the flashing. Flashing and animating draw
> > far too much attention; effectively this puts psychological pressure on
> > people to update immediately, as soon as there's a release. That's
> > uncalled for. It makes you feel you're neglecting something if you don't
> > obey the exclamation mark immediately and update.
>
> If people have only security.debian.org and the stable release (by
> name) in their sources.list, putting some pressure on them to upgrade
> is IMO a good thing.
>
> I didn't mention this, but one long-term idea I wrote down for the
> applet was to check whether any of the updates were security updates,
> and only do the flashing/whatever in that case. Unfortunately, I don't
> think this is possible -- you could check whether the source for the
> update is security.d.o, but that's probably not sufficient.
>
Hmm...
Whenever I run and apt-get update it only grabs the package files that
have been updated. (The Hit or Get thing in it I think.) If there is a
way to get a list of what was updated, you could then search for 'security'
in the URL of the files grabbed. If you find it, then alert the user with
the appropriate icon or dialog. I don't see any reason why a dialog would be
inappropriate here. Security updates are pretty important and the dialog
could allow the user to background an apt-get upgrade process if needed.
>From an administration standpoint this is a great idea. Sure blows
Windows Update out of the water. :)
Enough rambling from me...
Matthew McGuire
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