Blog post about package management (aimed at fedora)

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 12:05 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> as a sysadmin I will say this:
> 
> 1. if it ain't necessary it is off
> 2. if nothing deps on it, it gets removed.
> 
> 
> - now things depend on dbus these days, and that's fine - but on a
> server with a static ip- even served via dhcp we don't need it - it's
> just one more thing that can go wrong.

No-one would prevent you from not installing the bits that provide a
simple D-Bus interface for package management. I emphasize "simple", it
would be madness to export just half of what yum/apt/whatever is capable
of. The design of said interface would be driven by needs from (simple)
UI applications. The implementation of said software bits wouldn't even
need to come from yum, apt, whatever developers, it could be an
abstraction on top of this; of course for this to work in a social
context the relevant depsolver people would have to buy in and support
the project etc. etc. Which I'm skeptical about but I would loved to be
proved wrong.

As for you other comment, "yet another daemon", I concur we don't want
more daemons / services started than necessary. What Richard is
proposing would simply just be started via D-Bus system bus activation.
In fact, I think it's madness that there's a yum-updatesd in Fedora at
all, it should just be started when needed and kill itself when it's not
needed. If you need periodic checks, just use a cronjob and dbus-send(1)
to poke the daemon. Thing is, we need to start as little as possible
during boot.

      David