Bug#478904: cron script for apt needs improvement

[Michael Vogt <mvo@debian.org>]

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 01:08:22AM +0900, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> Hi,
Hi,
 
> Otavio and Mike,
> 
> (Mike being unattended-upgrades packager who may be most affected by my
> change oif I haad made wrong move, I want his opinion and review.)

Thanks for your patch! 
 
>   [ Osamu Aoki ]
>   * Updated cron script to support backups by hardlinks and
>     verbose levels.  All features turned off by default.

I like the verbose level addition, that is very helpfull. Could you
please tell me a bit more about the hardlink backup mechanism? What is
the use-case for this? It seems like it the MinAge feature in the cron
script mostly takes care of this, or am I overlooking something here?

>   * Added more error handlings.  Closes: #438803, #462734, #454989,
>   * Refactored condition structure to make download and upgrade performed
>     if only previous steps succeeded. Closes: #341970
>   * Documented all cron script related configuration items in
>     configure-index.
> 
> Please note I did not add  unattended-upgrades specific ones into
> configure-index.  Mike, you should do it to prevent nme space collision.
> 
> I am not using Ubunts and many of recent these feature seems to be lead
> by Ubunts stable support.  I do not want to create problem for them.

The unattended-upgrades support was developert for ubuntu. But there
is no reason why it can not (or should not) used in debian. It works
just fine there and the additional flexibility (blacklist support,
conffile checking) compared to other solutions seem like a useful
addition. If there are multiple competing ones, we could just add a
conf variable (like dir::bin::unattended-upgrades).

> On Sat, May 03, 2008 at 02:50:06PM -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote:
> > Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> writes:
> > > On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 12:20:12PM -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote:
> > >> Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> writes:
> > >> I do like your proposal and would like to know if you'd like to start
> > >> a bzr branch to work on that and then we can upload it to experimental
> > >> until Lenny is released.
> > > Thanks.   I will try.  Any site should I look besides archive site.
> > You could take a look at the alioth and you'd be able to host it there
> > i guess.
> 
> I am doing it but its progress is too slow.  I hope to see it finished by
> tommorow morning :-)  (Now: Mon May  5 01:03:23 JST 2008)
> 
> $ bzr push --create-prefix sftp://osamu@bzr.debian.org/~/public_html/apt
> 
> > We'd need to support backward compatibility but it doesn't need to be
> > done quietly. We might output a warning to let user to know that he
> > needs to change his/her configuration for the new variables and at
> > Lenny+2 we can drop it.
> 
> Anyway, these were undocumented feature in terms of normal document.
> 
> Since I added onfigure-index this time, it is minimally documented and
> tose old syntax are marked deprecated.  So dropping them infuture is
> doable.

I agree that the old names fit better into the periodic namespace but
I also think its not really worth to change them because its a small
cosmetic thing and if we drop the old names in the future that will
mean that a lot of our users (who customized them) will need to fix
there configs. 
 
> Since I made few extra verbosity control, I might have introduced bugs.
> Quick look at shell -x result seems OK.

Looking over the script I think the changes are ok. I would prefer to
not have the huge fi/else cascade around line 334 but I understand
that this is difficult to do in sh:
...
          debug_echo "download upgradable (not run)."
	  fi
    else
    debug_echo "download updated metadata (error)."
    fi
...



Thanks,
 Michael