Tony Nelson wrote:
At 7:08 AM +0100 7/11/05, Paul Howarth wrote:
On Sun, 2005-07-10 at 13:43 -0400, Tony Nelson wrote:
At 12:02 AM -0400 7/10/05, Terry Snyder wrote:
Ever since I upgraded to Fedora Core 4 from Fedora Core 3 my Red Hat
Network Alert Notification Tool has stopped working. Everything I
click on the blue check mark it ask to Activate my Subscription. I
click on Activate every time and I am still not notified when updates
are available. Is there any way to fix this?
What Paul Howarth said. No. Basically, Up2Date has been updated to use a
new data format and no longer needs a "headers" directory on the server.
Unfortunately, rhn-applet-*'s have not been updated and still rely on that
"headers" directory, and it is always empty.
No so; rhn-applet *has* been updated to handle repomd style metadata,
it's just broken (perhaps we should say "an attempt to update it to use
repomd metadata" has been made?).
Hmm, OK.
Actually I'll take back what I said about rhn-applet having been updated
to handle repomd style metadata. Yesterday I had a look at the code to
see if I could figure out what was wrong with it (as best I could since
I'm not a python programmer).
Whilst /usr/share/rhn/rhn_applet/rhn_sources.py parses the repomd entry
in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources, that's about it as far as repomd handling
goes.
The first thing that seems to go wrong is that an exception is thrown
when trying to lnstantiate an object of class AppletSourcesConfigFile to
parse the configuration file. The parent of this class is
SourcesConfigFile from up2date
(/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/sourcesConfig.py), which tries to import
"yumBaseRepo" from
/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/repoBackends/yumBaseRepo.py. This in turn
tries to import "yum" (part of yum itself), which tries to import the
following:
import rpmUtils
import rpmUtils.updates
import rpmUtils.arch
The exception is thrown when trying to import "rpmUtils.updates". I
believe this is due to a namespace clash, as there is a rpmUtils.py file
in /usr/share/rhn/up2date_client, whereas yum is looking for the
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rpmUtils directory. This problem can be
worked around by adding the three "import" lines above near the start of
/usr/bin/rhn-applet-{gui,tui}.
The next thing that goes wrong is that initUp2dateConfig from
/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/config.py is called, and this falls over
because regular users can't read /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date-uuid.
Comments in the code suggest that the applet shouldn't even be trying to
read this file, but I can't figure out that bit (yet). If the code is
tweaked to ignore this error, the next problem appears when we arrive at
/usr/share/rhn/rhn_applet/rhn_applet_model.py to process the repo
entries (the __build_sources method). This code understands sources of
type "up2date" (not used in Fedora), "yum", and "apt" but not "repomd",
so it bombs out.
That's as far as I got, and I'm giving up on it. Perhaps the tweak to
import the rpmUtils modules early changed subsequent code paths so I'm
missing something significant. I don't know; as I said I'm not a python
programmer.
Both up2date and rhn-applet still use a "headers" directory if you
specify a "yum" repo (rather than repomd) in the rhn sources file.
I'm on FC3 and Up2Date works for me (though not for some people). In my
opinion, until FC4 has a working Up2Date (or a replacement)
Isn't yum a replacement?
Oh. Does FC4 yum notify users when there are updates to install, say, by
puting an icon in the top bar?
No. But you could run "yum check-update" to find out if there are any
updates.
Paul.
