Bug 311661

Created attachment 210911 [details]
patch

Good catch on the multiple instances - will get better lockfiling rolled in
based on your patch for daily and weekly jobs.

Regarding its interaction with yum-updatesd.  As I understand it, yum-updatesd
should only be locking access to command line yum when it's actually yum-ing
something rather than sleeping.  At least, in bug 212507 locking out yum access
forever was described as a bug, and allegedly fixed.  What exactly is
yum-updatesd locking?  Not that I'd adverse to putting in a conflicts, but I
could imagine that a workstation power user sort of person might want the
goodness of yum-cron at night and on weekends, while still getting his blinky
gnome button for updates that are pushed when he's logged in.

I haven't observed the yum-updatesd behavior changing. How I noticed this was
about a week ago my computer lost power. After restarting it yum-updatesd was
started again (I thought I had previously disabled it, but maybe installing an
upgrade re-enables it?). 

When I noticed that my /var/log/yum.log lacked recent updates, I assumed
yum-cron wasn't working. Instead 'ps' showed 3 instances of yum.cron running as
well as yum-updatesd. Killing the yum.cron processes resulted in me receiving 3
cron emails containing hundreds (thousands?) of lines from yum.cron saying that
it was waiting for the yum lock to release. 

Therefore, either yum-updatesd still holds a global lock, or there's a
super-recent (within 1 week) update that changes that behavior.

Pushed yum-cron-0.5-1 to {devel, FC-6, F-7, EPEL-5} with Steve's lockfile stuff
in both the daily and weekly yum-cron scripts.  Should show up in F-7's testing
repository soon.

However, I am still doing research on how yum-updatesd works or is supposed to
work, so will leave this bug open until we figure out what do to about yum-cron
vs yum-updatesd conflicts.

yum-cron-0.5-1.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 testing repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
 If you want to test the update, you can install it with 
 su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update yum-cron'

yum-cron-0.5-1.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

So Bodhi closed this bug automatically before I would have, but after doing more
research on the yum-updatesd problems, it seems that yum-updatesd only locks out
other yum transactions when it is either actively doing something (a good thing)
or when it's hung (a bad thing).  But hanging yum-updatesd is outside the scope
of this bug, and for installations where yum-updatesd is behaving there's no
reason to put in a conflicts -- the user might really want to have cron deal
with updates when they're not logged in, but still get the blinky notification
icon if they're working.

Steve's lockfile magic does keep yum-cron from misbehaving.

Apparently yum-updatesd has been completely re-written for F-8 and is much more
stable.  I would be interested in hearing from people running both packages on F-8.

Thanks for investigating yum-updatesd. IMHO it's the weakest point in Fedora. I
sure hope the rewrite makes it usable.