From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030703 Epiphany/0.7.3 Description of problem: I think it would be nice if the rhn-applet would not show any messages at all on the panel if the system has been registered with RHN and is up2date. After the installation the user should get the exclamation mark asking him to register with RHN. He can either register or get rid of rhn-applet altogether. If he registers, then the applet checks the server and prompts him to update his system. After the system has been updated rhn-applets disappears from the notification area, and runs only in the background. It only reappears again when there are new updates available or some other kind of important information for the user. I just think it is a waste of valuable panel space to have it most of the time in the "checkmark" state. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rhn-applet-2.0.9-1
up2date isn't the only method of keeping your system up to date. You can also use yum. http://www.hut.fi/~tkarvine/yum-package-manager.html Once you've installed yum, you could of course remove up2date (described in the above link) and get rid of the panel icon altogether.
I would suggest that the current operation of the rhn-applet with regards to this issue (i.e. always indicating your current status, even when you are fully updated) should be corrected. It probably violates the spirit of the HIG, in particular the warning "...icons that appear only temporarily in response to events are preferable" is relevant (ref. http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/desktop-notification-area.html) At the very least I would think that there should be a preference allowing the user to select which behaviour they prefer. As an additional note: up2date can be configured to use apt/yum repositories, thus it is not outdated (yet).
this bug is still present in rhn-applet-2.1.17-3