xfce4-smartpm-plugin (was Re: smart Digest, Vol 21, Issue 3)

[Anders F Björklund]

Grant McWilliams wrote:

>> I've done a panel plugin for Xfce 4.4 and Smart 0.50.
>> (recently renamed xfce4-smartpm-plugin, with the "pm")
>>
>  Perfect timing! I'm using XFCE 4.4 on CentOS5 for a project and  
> needed that. I'm a little confused though
> because you say it checks for package upgrades but does not check the  
> network for updates. Could you explain?

I meant *automatically*. There is an option to have it check for  
upgrades with a timer (every X minutes), but to do channel updates you  
need to use the menu item / dialog button. This is mostly a permissions  
issue, though. If I wanted the plugin to check the network for updates,  
I would need to install a suid binary (e.g. make sure "smart-update"  
was installed) or install a root cronjob or do a background daemon or  
something. And since that's all rather complex and subject to a lot of  
opinions, I just left it all up to the user (and possibly their system  
administrator) to configure... For now anyway, it could always be added  
later ?

Here's the essence of the cron.daily script that I use:  
(/etc/cron.daily/smart.cron)
smart update
smart upgrade --download --yes

It will update the channels, and then download all packages to the  
cache. Then the icon will light up in the panel, once the next upgrade  
check occurs. Eventually, it could be useful to have it show a upgrade  
notification as well:

http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/notification-daemon- 
xfce#screenshots

But having upgrades and updates automatically configured rises a bunch  
of questions, like "how often should it check" and "what time should it  
check". And since the answers vary, I just default it to "never" and  
let the users enable it... :-)

--anders