[442] in athena10
Re: Automatic updates for Athena 10
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Sun Aug 17 03:23:52 2008
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 03:23:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <200808170723.m7H7N7Fm028968@outgoing.mit.edu>
To: ghudson@mit.edu
CC: athena10@mit.edu
In-reply-to: <200807241921.m6OJLqvx028088@outgoing.mit.edu>
Here's the current status of the auto update:
* It's implemented and, as far as I know, working. It's hard to know
how well an auto-update is working until there are updates for it to
take, so I've installed it on my office machine and will see how it
goes.
* It's using Anders's suggestion for ensuring that debathena-cluster
(or debathena-workstation or whatever metapackage you have
installed) doesn't get deinstalled. If it's invoked via cron and
someone is logged into gdm, it downloads updates in the background
so that logins aren't blocked for as long when the update actually
happens.
* A separate package, debathena-reactivate, owns the logout hook. The
plan is that reactivate will also clean up user processes from the
previous login and run a "fast verify" (config file cleanup,
basically) between logins. It might also do a slow verify (full
package check) every ten logins or so; not sure about that idea.
* User feedback is not there yet. Logins are blocked during updates
but there's no visual indication that an update (or in the future,
slow verify) is happening. To do user feedback, I need to write a
program which displays a message in a window at the top of the
display, retrying periodically if the display dies, until it is
killed. This is a little tricky because Xlib assumes that the
program will abort if the display dies. That can be worked around
by using a pair of processes. This is more work than I really want
to do, so I'm not sure where it will fit into the time I have left.
