Dear Maarten, I very much agree with your sentiments, and I have attempted to provide an ad hoc solution for the benefit of users at this institution. I hope it will be rendered obsolete by whatever features SuSE provide in 7.1, though I suspect it won't. On suse.cs.rhul.ac.uk we maintain a mirror of the SuSE ftp site. The main distribution is restricted to local users, but the update sections are publicly accessable. Alongside the updates I have created directories important-7.0 and important-7.1. Every time a security alert comes out I add a link in here to the new RPM, and maybe in the future I will add some non-security updates if they seem especially relevant to users here. Anyway, I'm happy for other people to use these directories if they find them useful. You may not want to...you have no reason to trust either my competence or integrity. If so, please don't flame me. Constructive comments are welcome, and certainly I want to hear about any mistakes (the process is manual and it is easy to make errors). The directories can be found at ftp://suse.cs.rhul.ac.uk/pub/rhul_suse/ Regards, Bob On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, maarten van den Berg wrote:
If I may add something that been a longtime bother to me, I think the current update solution in place lacks in several key points... [Sorry if I drift off-topic.]
First, I would like it if SuSE indeed made more of a difference between bugfixes and securityfixes. Now they're in the same ftp-updates tree. An approach where there are several different trees for several different levels of severity is much more pleasant, and it helps people avoiding upgrading several huge CMap-Adobe-* rpms on systems that do not need those rpms even if they did have holes big enough to drive trucks through.
What I'm wishing for is a single update-directory containing all critical-level security fixes. Preferably not divided in series sec, n1, ap etc. because it only confuses ftpclients and it doesn't matter; if it's critical that's enough, and it doesn't really matter whether it comes from n1, sec, d1 or ap. Or does it.
============================================================== Bob Vickers R.Vickers@cs.rhul.ac.uk Dept of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London WWW: http://www.cs.rhul.ac.uk/home/bobv Phone: +44 1784 443691