Hello, I'll send a SR to include patch2mail in Factory in some minutes. Some information about the package according to http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:How_to_contribute_to_Factory :

the name and purpose

patch2mail is a small script that sends a mail to root if new patches are available. It runs via cron.daily. On the technical side, it uses "zypper --xmlout lu -t patch" and xsltproc to make the output human-readable.

how long has it been around?

It's in the Contrib repo since 11.2, and has been in my home repo before. Since some days, it's also in system:packagemanager which will be the devel project. patch2mail supports all zypper versions since openSUSE 10.2 (as long as you build for the respective release), but in practise this won't help you much for the no longer supported releases ;-) In theory the 11.1 package should also work for SLES 11, but I never had a SLES installation available to test it.

how well has it been tested?

Since it consists only of a small script and some XSLT, there isn't too much to go wrong ;-) Changes in the commandline parameters or XML format of zypper are the only exceptions (both happened already in older distribution releases). That said: Well-tested on 11.3 and older, not yet tested in Factory by me because I'm still on 11.3. As long as the zypper interface didn't change, it will also work in Factory.

what is the upstream project?

"project" is a big word for 16 lines of shell script and 120 lines of XSLT ;-) but basically I am also the upstream developer. I'll announce new versions etc. in my blog - http://blog.cboltz.de or http://blog.cboltz.de/plugin/tag/patch2mail if you want only articles about patch2mail.

does it have a track record of security issues?

No :-)

what is the purpose of having it in the distribution?

It is a useful tool for servers (where you don't have a desktop to show the update applet ;-) to inform the admin when new updates (to be exact: patches) are available.

who are its users?

Administrators of servers - and of any system you don't use personally (for example if you have to maintain some desktops in the office).

what is the license?

GPL 2 or later Regards, Christian Boltz -- "What, you don't think "insmod emacs" is a good idea?" -- Joe Moore -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org