Every time MS Update annoys me I'm quite quick to share my annoyance with the world so it seems only fair that I should do the same for Redhat's Up2date. I just wasted an entire afternoon baby-sitting Up2date when I had real work to be doing. I had two servers that had gotten a bit behind on their updates because they were taken out of production a few months ago and I guess the hope was that they'd never end up back in production. But, as Black Adder would say "needs must when fortune vomits in your kettle" so back into production these two dinosaurs are going. They are both running RHEL ES 4 so in terms of software they sure aren't dinosaurs but their hardware is far from cutting edge! But I digress, the point is I had to waste an entire afternoon babysitting Up2date because it sucks and that is just not good enough in my book.

If You get Behind You're in for a Rough Ride

When you have a lot of packages that need updating (I had 254 on one of the boxes) Up2date seems very prone to crashing while working out the dependencies. After a few attempts to do the lot at once I soon realised I was being silly so I did them 10 at a time. Then after that worked fine for a few lots I started doing them 20 at a time. Finally when there were only a hundred or so left, and I'd cherry picked all the important ones (public facing services), I let it try the remainder in one go. It worked … eventually. On a number of occasions the GUI went unresponsive for long periods of time and the Windows user in me was tempted to kill the process because it had obviously died. However, I just walked away, had a drink, and when I came back things had moved on a bit.

So, the bottom line is, if you have a lot of packages Up2date will probably give you trouble and you'll probably have to do it in chunks. This is just not good enough.

Waa Waa …. Give Me Your Undevided Attention Now

With MS update you review the updates you want, click 'Next' and it just gets on with it. No more feedback is asked until it's finished or there's a problem. Up2date on the other hand behaves like a spoilt child and demands constant attention and validation or it just won't do your updates for you. Most of time it is not even asking your for any information or input, it is just letting you know that it has done some of it's chores and won't move on till you acknowledge that and click "Forward" to encourage it to do another bit. This means you can't just start it and walk away for an hour or two like you can on the Mac or on Windows (though on Windows you need to run the whole thing a few times till you're done even when it tells you you are done you probably aren't). I should just be able to select my packages, start it running and forget about it while it does it's thing but you can't. You have to babysit it and that just leads to pointless time wasting. Again, this is just not good enough. Particularly from an OS targeted at large enterprise networks where you have tens or even hundreds of servers.

8 is Less than 7 Apparently

The third thing it did today to annoy me was that it tried to "update" PostgreSQL from version 8.0.7 to version 7.4.0. Yup, Up2date fails on elementary Maths! 8 is greater than 7 so you can't upgrade from 8 to 7! It's a good thing I spotted this because version 8 was installed for a reason. Going down to version 7 would have broken one of the main apps the server is there to host!

Conclusions

The only advantage Up2Date has over MS Update is that you don't have to reboot all the time but that really has nothing to do with Up2date and everything to do with Linux so I'm not really prepared to give it credit for that. Up2date can be described as "flacky" at best, and TBH I'd describe it as downright unstable, but I tend to get a little too critical of software that annoys me! It is also pointlessly demanding of feedback so you just end up wasting your time clicking 'Forward'. In theory of course we should never have to run Up2date on a server manually because all our servers are in RHN. This means that in theory so we can push updates out to all our servers from a web interface but that is even more flacky than running Up2date locally so we end up spending a lot of time at the consol spoonfeeding Up2date. We only have about forty servers …. I'd hate to have any more!

What makes all this even worse is that there are other Linux distros out there with superb package management systems like Debian's Apt. In fact, Yum on Redhat's Fedora Core works dramatically better than Up2date so it's not even a case that they would have to abandon RPM files to give us an improvement. Redhat really have no excuse for shipping their OS with this poor excuse for a package manager.

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[tags]Linux, Redhat, Up2date, MS Update[/tags]