Marcus Meissner wrote: Thanks for your answer. But it shows that my question was not formulated good enough. (Maybe I shouldn't write emails as late as 4am... :-)
For the rest you need to understand that YOU only provides updates in regards to bug or security fixes. They only come from the official YOU SUSE Servers.
Additional package sources are different and explained on opensuse.org like you found.
I know the technology. That's why I asked for the _strategy_. I.e., I don't want to know how I _do_ updates, but I want to know about experiences how others _approach_ the _task_ of updates. Process, not procedures. The preposition is that additional package repositories are used. (I don't think one has to discuss this at length, two words suffice: MP3 and DVD.) What do other people use? YOU? apt? How about smart? What are their experiences? Does it just work? Where are the pitfalls? E.g., -- If they use apt4rpm repositories, are all security updates also in those apt repositories? -- If they use apt, is apticron available? I haven't seen a package for it. -- Do they use two different update processes, one for SUSE packages and one for others? If they use two processes, how do they handle conflicts? -- Do SUSE package repositories hold _all_ necessary updates; also for the commercial packages that are only on the retail DVD? If no, where do I get updates for them? But since you write:
Start YOU. Press "Automatic Download of Patches" Button. Follow Dialog.
If there is need you can do your own cron jobs with "online_update" command line tool. See man online_update.
some comments on online_update. First, # man online_update No manual entry for online_update A man page would be nice. Perhaps you might want to open an internal ticket that one gets written... ;-) For information, one has to fall back on online_update -h. And that doesn't explain that there seems to be three modes: `download or apply patches' with -g and -i, `show patches' with -s and -d, and `check updates' with -q and -k. The differences between those modes are slightly unclear, in particular between the first and the second. After all, -s downloads and applies patches as well. As I wrote, I don't want to apply patches automatically, since I want to know when I have to restart applications. I.e., I want an email that I shall install patches and another command to do so. I have to say that your explanation doesn't supply a solution for this demand. yast installs a cron job with online_update -g -P. Fine, but that doesn't output that there are patches to apply. I.e., no email is sent. The patches are downloaded, but that's all. Frankly, without notification online_update -g is worthless -- it's nice that the patch is downloaded, but no admin action is triggered. This is not a supported update process. In the past, I used online_update -s -d | grep INSTALL. That's because I want the email _only_ when I have to do something and not every day. It would be nice if online_update would have an explicit and supported method to supply such an you-have-to-do-something email, like apticron in Debian has. The command above has the risk that INSTALL lines are not the only ones that I want to look at. When I'm switching to 10.0 now, I have to investigate first the output of online_update -s -d and see if it hasn't changed. And that's bad, quite honestly -- in Debian I don't have to do such work myself. Just some thoughts for improving the SUSE-technology of online updates. :-) I am using SUSE since 5.1 (I'm a paying subscriber), and I think it's said that the update technology still has its sharp corners that hurt users and where better solutions exist in other distributions. Cheers, Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany