crond disabled?

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:
>>> Do we really want to be running something like update which (I assume)
>>> takes significant resources without consulting with the user?
>>
>> Yes! Remember, these are not designed as normal laptops. They are for
>> young children and for use in schools. The only time to do updates is
>> when the child is at school, connected to the school server, and if
>> updates are not fully automatic then they simply will not happen.
>
> In an endeavor *completely* removed from OLPC (or the XO), I've had
> a long-standing philosophy difference - I'm a "hands on" guy - and
> they don't want to facilitate that.  Now with regard to automatic
> updates, the same philosophy difference is showing up with the XO:
>
> Wiki page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Update_streams  describes how by
> specifying 'none' as the update-stream value, updates are supposed
> to be "never update me" (automatically).  Yet, despite me always
> having 'none' in /security/update-stream -- in 2007/2008 if I
> entered 'top' I all too frequently saw 'olpc-update-query' using
> system resources (uselessly, because it was unable to get through my
> proxy back to any server).  [I do updating with manual commands.]
>
> Please -- do run your automatic updates to your heart's content.
> But if a non-child XO user like me has specified 'none' -- DON'T run
> automatic updates.

Mikus: olpc-update-query should be launching, seeing your 'none'
stream, and immediately exiting.  It's just a software maintenance
issue that it launches at all; cron doesn't allow conditionals in
crontab.  I don't have the source handy, but I suspect I implemented
'none' server side just to avoid cluttering up the client code with
special cases, but I'm sure a patch would be accepted to do early exit
on 'none' if you'd like to write one.
 --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )