Comments on: Service Pack GUI?

By: Marcelo

Marcelo — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:49:42 +0000

Is this tool similar to APTonCD ??

By: Fabian

Fabian — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:19:56 +0000

Great work! I would hope that distributions would pick something like this up pretty soon so that you can create servicepacks from e.g. ubunut.org
without the need to even run linux.

I wrote down my idea in more detail here.

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/12998/

But I guess developing something like this should be picked up by the distros
themselves.

Thanks, Fabian

By: hughsie

hughsie — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:28:27 +0000

Angel: I’ve added an option in the GUI. Refresh the screenshot.

There’s also a large entry in the help file explaining what all these options mean. It’ll be in Fedora rawhide on Monday.

By: Angel Marin

Angel Marin — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:42:44 +0000

I’m with @ssam here, I have a bunch of networkless fedora machines where it would be easier to apply updates/upgrades if we could provide the /var/log/rpmpkgs log or equivalent to a simple UI like this and generate the update pack for a different machine.

BTW, a UI where you could hit a ‘Generate update pack request’ button that gathers all the info needed from a target machine and puts it in some PK file format, so you can ask users to push it+send you the file periodically so you can generate and give them an update CD or DVD would be awesome

By: Fedora Service Pack « Juanfgs’s Blog

Fedora Service Pack « Juanfgs’s Blog — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:20:30 +0000

[...] en el blog de Richard Hughes que se esta trabajando en la GUI de un generador de Service Pack para Fedora, si bien la palabra [...]

By: ssam

ssam — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:56:17 +0000

this could be great for doing installs inplaces that dont have network access (or only have dialup).

what it would need is to be able to putting in all the packages relative to a standard install. so from a currently up to date F9 install, i could make a service pack that would bring a fresh F9 install up to date. (and the same for making an installer). From the description above it looks like i could only make such a service pack with a fresh F9 install.

thanks

By: mpt

mpt — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:34:29 +0000

“Service pack” is a silly name, and that Microsoft Windows uses it does not stop it from being a silly name. It has nothing to do with service. Alternative possibilities include “update pack” or “combined update”.

“Generator” is possibly too introspective. If people will be launching this program via the overall package manager, rather than standalone, it would make more sense to use a task-based title, such as “Prepare a Combo Update”.

In your mockup, the phrase “Create an archive of” is used twice in quick succession, which means the labels need refactoring.

“Details” is not a useful heading, and could easily be removed.

“Close” should be “Cancel”.

By: ulrik

ulrik — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:03:54 +0000

@Joseph: Highly requested. I even downloaded the full texlive packages (latex) twice now, and looking in the changelog it seems only the build system was changed or similar. That means.. 2 times > 400 MB for something that has 0 effect !! Of course I chose to update the packages myself but why think, I just lazily do “aptitude safe-upgrade”..

@oliver: there are no package diffs, only the package list diffs in debian. I don’t know if there is any WIP.

By: oliver

oliver — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:12:31 +0000

@Botond: right, a listbox wouldn’t be that helpful either. A search box might be better; or maybe make it similar to the existing app-installer GUI elements?

@Debarshi: the use case of updating a machine that’s connected with low bandwidth or an expensive connection would be interesting to me as well. I had to support one such machine myself and ended up with some scripts around apt and dpkg which did the downloading etc. (it was quite a PITA). It would be nice if these uses cases were officially supported by the distros, but unfortunately these problems are often met with “let’s just wait until the user gets a better connection -> problem solved”.

@Joseph: AFAIK Debian now uses some mechanism to publish package list diffs at least (see http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/439). Not sure if this has been extended to actual packages as well, though.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:48:15 +0000

this frickin trackpad tap-to-click crap is driving me nuts. My thumb hits the trackpad when typing, but Ubuntu doesn’t have an elantech driver so it’s detected as a scrolly-mouse and I can’t turn off the fricking tap-to-clikc behavior

“Or perhaps, using the diff and exiting files, yo”u could re-assemble the full package from the cached previous version or even from the files on your disk (you already have them; why re-download them?) This seems to be the best way to do this immedately; “diff-packages” would require intervention in rpm and dpkg.