Blog post about package management (aimed at fedora)

[Matthias Clasen]

On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 11:31 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Richard Hughes (hughsient at gmail.com) said: 
> > > 1) query metadata (download from internet)
> > 
> > Starting a service takes a few ms.
> 
> To handle the 'start()' signal, sure. But it depends on the service
> itself as to when it's ready. I'm mainly just wondering about system
> activation as an appropriate API for any service that takes a non-trivial
> amount of time to initialize.

There has been some discussion with Havoc about the need for a 2-phase
protocol for taking bus names, to differentiate the use of bus names
for locking and for signaling readyness. I guess this is what we are
talking about here, on the one hand, the service needs to take the bus
name as early as possible to prevent other instances from taking it, on
the other hand, it should be ready for service when it takes the bus
name.

> > > 2) query installed packages
> > 
> > If the metadata is already okay it should be really quick. Or do I
> > misunderstand your point?
> 
> ... which would require some sort of daemon/automated task to make
> sure it's up to date. But we're off in the weeds now.

How so ? Isn't that exactly what yum-updatesd is supposed to do ?