I desire a fixed time for eos-update-notifier to run and look for updates, ideally Friday afternoons, say 16:37pm. I’d also like to be able to run ad-hoc manual updates during the week (browser zero day for instance) and not have that update, delay or reset the Friday weekly sequence.
Ideally this run would occur at the system level and not user level. It’d be awesome to download the updates but not apply them until I’ve reviewed them. Then review and apply after 16:37pm when I’m available and at my computer.
The configuration documentation for OnCalendar= isn’t documented to permit this, and seems geared for just daily or checks every few hours. Can a fixed weekly check be done, or am I looking at submitting a feature request for such?
Doesn’t that set the next instance to 7 days from now? and 7 days from whenever I run it, such as for a browser zero day update?
Related Q, If the update checks at Friday 16:37, and I don’t get to it until next day, Saturday 08:25 and run it, will the next instance be 7 days from Saturday 08:25 or the previous Friday 16:37 plus 7 days?
Would this be legal syntax on a notifier config file?
Yes, thanks, that EndeavourOS Update Notifier article was one of my links in my original first post of several pages I researched that came close but didn’t match what I need… It’s still not clear if I can do what I want to do: a set check on Friday afternoons at a specific time and every Friday afternoon.
I also want to do CLI updates as needed that doesn’t upset the Friday afternoon schedule of specific applications - just browsers. For instance today, when Chrome 94.0.3606.54 is released, and all the Chromium based browsers are likely to follow in the coming days with their own updates.
if this isn’t possible to do, I’d be happy to submit an enhancement request on the future eos-update-notifier roadmap for consideration.
You can’t pick and choose what updates you want to do. Updating updates whatever updates come from upstream. You can’t do partial updates. All updates will come as they are released including kernels. Pacman doesn’t allow for that.
I should be able to just pick a browser (Firefox, Brave, Chrome, Chromium, etc) though and whatever dependencies they need, right? They shouldn’t need a new kernel, new XFCE4, and other core libraries, etc.
Rest of the updates from the week I’d like to install on each and every Friday.
I’m not sure why you would want to do this instead of just updating whether there are updates or not. EndeavourOS is based on Arch rolling and updates are continual. Trying to do partial updates or certain updates and holding back other updates is going to cause problems. You will end up with a system that won’t update or not boot. Updates are very quick so it’s not a problem. I wouldn’t be concerned with that. If you want to update only once a week that’s fine. If you are installing anything you should always make sure it’s updated first anyway.
Many times I don’t want to have to reboot right then, esp if there’s a new kernel being picked up.
kernel 5.14 has had a couple of releases last week which I accidentally picked up that I would have liked to have deferred for a weekend time when I have more personal time to potentially handle a kernel update issues.
Browsers, being a pretty high vector for security issues and also as high level apps (versus libraries and other infrastructure) ought to be able to be installed anytime.
If I built a new EndeavourOS box, did weekly notification checks for updates, but mid-week decided that I’d like to install a browser (via pacman -S) that I haven’t yet had on the machine, I’d be in a similar boat to having new packages and libraries awaiting update, but a newer browser on the disk. Generally, since browsers are high level apps, I don’t think any cases of not having the latest updates would mess them up.
Thanks for your time and help. I understand where you are coming from. I really like EndeavousOS and it’s community!
I understand your thoughts on this, as @ringo already explained we don’t encourage you to perform partial updates, you can do that manually.
Performing all updates at the weekend isn’t a bad thing and certainly not risky. Updates, including browsers, on Arch, are released faster than on Ubuntu-based distros, so when you wait a couple of days to update the entire system wouldn’t be a major security issue. You still would be in sync with the other distros.
Actually cherry-picking updates is a very tricky thing to accomplish on anything Arch based, and not recommended even then. Waiting for a weekend (or whatever timing works for you) to run the updates is not a problem. Finding out what updates are coming down is also easy, especially on EndeavourOS - no notifier required, Just enter checkupdatesext in a terminal (or just checkupdates) for a formatted list of what’s awaiting - and you can decide whether to run the update then or not depending on content I suppose.
If you want to know AUR update status at the same time, I have a little bash function or 2 for the purpose (simultaneous repo and AUR updates lists with 1 command) - I can post them again if you might want them
It’s not exactly a secret how to get the info - what I was suggesting was avoiding needing 2 commands, and getting it preformatted
All good, either way.
