Bug 167393

Summary: enhance yum to allow querying of update types ('security'/'features')
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: James Hunt <jamesodhunt>
Component: yumAssignee: Jeremy Katz <katzj>
Status: CLOSED DEFERRED QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 4CC: katzj
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: FutureFeature
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Enhancement
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Last Closed: 2005-09-02 12:51:32 UTC Type: ---
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Description James Hunt 2005-09-02 10:24:35 UTC
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Description of problem:
It would be extremely useful if it where possible to query yum for the _type_ of available updates. Today we have:

  yum list updates

which lists all updates. I propose we extend this to something like

  yum list security-updates
  yum list standard-updates

.. and change the output of, "yum list updates" to list the type of each update.
These new commands would allow an admin to determine which updates were made available due to security issues with the previous versions, and which updates are merely new versions of packages. Maybe we could make this even more fine-grained?

The alternative is that we have a separate security-updates repository, but I think that is a little unwieldy.

As another alternative, could some tag be added to the "rpm --changelog" output. Although this is not as useful as being able to query the yum repo directly, it would still allow admins to download all updates and before installing them determine _why_ particular packages have been udpated. On the subject of --changelog, it would be great if _full_ changelogs were put into RPMs with more descriptive text. For example, a lot of changelogs say things like "Fixed buffer
overflow problem, "dropped wibble patch", "bumped version number", etc. These descriptions aren't really very descriptive unless you've got all the source code to hand!







Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
yum-2.3.2-7

How reproducible:
Didn't try


Additional info:

Comment 1 Seth Vidal 2005-09-02 12:51:32 UTC
The data in order to query updates based on their type is just not present in
any metadata yum has access to. We would like to implement something like this
but it will take much more time and it involves a lot of components, not just yum.

Closing this as deferred