Byobu shows incorrect number of updates available on amazon linux

[Stuart Page]

The indicator showing the number of updates available appears to never update unless I reboot as shown in the attached image. (Using byobu tmux)

Distro: Amazon Linux.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Thanks for the bug, and especially the screenshot.

So you're evidently running an Amazon Linux instance, which I think uses rpm-based packages, right?

If so, here's how Byobu is counting the number of updates available in /usr/lib/byobu/updates_available:

yum list updates -q | grep -vc "Updated Packages"

Now, that uses a cached list of packages and versions. It's a very expensive, network intensive operation to update those package lists. Byobu can't, and won't be able to do that automatically for you.

You could put something like this in a cronjob (perhaps hourly?):

yum check-update

Or you could ask your OS vendor to update your package lists more frequently.

Cheers!
Dustin

[Stuart Page (sdpagent)]

Hey Dustin,
Thanks for getting back to me. I tried the command that you say byobu will use to count the number of outstanding packages and got 0 as a response. So it looks like byobu (with tmux session management) is not updating to use this value? See attachment.

I'm currently on byobu 5.94
tmux 1.8

Stu