smart flags and errata updates

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hey Anders,

> I've made an addition to the rpm-md and urpmi parsers,
> so that they will read the repodata "updateinfo.xml" or
> media_info "descriptions" file and flag the packages...
> 
> The smart flags are: security, bugfix, enhancement (etc)
> as noted by the separate file with the security advisories
> (sadly not yet available for CentOS, only Fedora and RHEL*)

Interesting idea!

> Then I added a new --flag parameter to query and upgrade,
> so that you can filter the query lists by errata severity
> or (for instance) only do the security-related upgrades:
> 
> smart query --name firefox --flag enhancement
> smart upgrade --flag security
> smart flag --show
> 
> Tested with Fedora 9, openSUSE 11 and Mandriva 2008.1.
> Not the actual distros, but with the metadata available
> from the RPM package repositories for each distribution:
> 
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/9/i386/repodata/
> http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.0/repodata/
> ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/Mandriva/official/2008.1/i586/media/main/updates/media_info/ 
> 
> 
> There is currently "no place" in Smart to store the other
> related information, such as the update description or the
> references to other resources - such as CVEs or bugzilla:

Right, we should understand if some of that information should
actually become part of the PackageInfo.

> http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/
> http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/
> http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/security-announce/
> 
> If it was added in a future release, they could be parsed too.
> Another thing that would be useful would be to add the flag
> filtering capability (generically) to the --gui interface...

Both of these sound like good ideas.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net