general questions about updates

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 08:43:37AM -0400, Chris Aitken wrote:
> I just got my first "There are four updates" offering. Then I get to 
> view the updates to accept them or not. Is there any general wisdom 
> about accepting these updates?
> 
> 1. Are they usually so small you might as well just take 'em all?

On Debian I pretty much always upgrade everything unless I have a
specific reason for not upgrading something, in which case I put it on
hold.

> 2. Are they likely to enhance operations of other applications - ones 
> that don't seem to be related to the update package? For instance is 
> elfutils likely to help me with anything other than an app called "elf" 
> (if there is such a beast)?

elfutils will only do something if you are doing development and need to
inspect internal details of binaries.  All the updates are probably just
minor bug fixes.

> 3. Are the offerings customized to my system, or are they just all the 
> updates created in the four days since I installed fedora7 (four seems 
> like a lot, btw - I'm amazed how people work on these things for nothing 
> but the pleasure of doing a good thing)?

Just the updates in the last four days to the packages you have
installed (at least I hope that is how fedora's update system works).

> Here are the offerings:
> 
> updated elfutils packages available

Utilities for inspecting and working with elf binaries.  No idea why
that would normally be installed unless you do actual development on the
system.

> updated liberation-fonts packages available

Some font package I guess.  Never heard of it.  Not in Debian under any
name similar to that.

> updated liboil packages available

Library of optimized inner loops.  Used by gstreamer and other video
stuff under gnome (and possibly other things too).

> updated rpm packages available

package manager obviously.

> None of those packages ring a bell - other than rpm.

--
Len Sorensen
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