Bug 335305

Summary: automatic online update produces bad output
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 10.3 Reporter: Björn Voigt <bjoernv>
Component: Update ProblemsAssignee: Jiří Suchomel <jsuchome>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Björn Voigt 2007-10-19 17:29:14 UTC 
The automatic online update configures a cron job like this (/etc/cron.d/yast2-online-update):

33 15 * * * root zypper up -y -t patch  --skip-interactive

Because such cron jobs produce output, root gets an e-mail with zypper's output.

This output is really hard to read. The output contains special chars and is very redundant because of progress bars etc. The output seems to be optimized for interactive use and maybe for internal use (option --terse).

Manually switching off the cron job output is not a good idea, because the system administrator often wants to know, which updates had been installed. The options "--quiet" and "--terse" do not solve the problem completely because there output is also hard to read.
Comment 1 Jan Kupec 2007-10-30 16:39:56 UTC 
Jirko, i fixed the --quiet output in zypper (will be in zypper 0.9.2), please use --quiet in the automatic online update.
Comment 4 Jiří Suchomel 2007-10-31 10:23:09 UTC 
yast2-online-update-2.16.1
Comment 5 Björn Voigt 2007-11-01 19:55:58 UTC 
May be it's easier to let "zypper" auto-detect, if it runs within a terminal or not. If it's not running in a terminal, zypper should not print progress information and control characters.

Such a auto-detection could be made with isatty(STDOUT_FILENO) in C.
Comment 6 Björn Voigt 2007-12-03 20:36:40 UTC 
And will yast2-online-update-2.16 come as an online update for openSUSE 10.3?
Comment 7 Jiří Suchomel 2007-12-04 08:26:57 UTC 
AFAIK no, because the required version of zypper was not released.
But you can install the new one from factory source.