Comment 9 for bug 268765

This hourly cronjob was debated yesterday on #ubuntu-devel. For now, we are keeping it, specially because we changed it so it only runs when landscape-client itself is running:

<mathiaz> niemeyer: the concern is to put too much load on the servers and mirrors
<slangasek> mathiaz: I agree that if you're managing a bunch of workstations centrally, you want the average latency to be much lower than 12h
<niemeyer> mathiaz: Well, I agree.. it would consume less resources from the server
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<niemeyer> mathiaz: The question, though, is if it makes an important difference or not
<niemeyer> mathiaz: It does make a difference for Landscape usability
<niemeyer> mathiaz: If you're concerned about it, we can ask elmo about it
<mathiaz> niemeyer: the main raise I'm asking is that the default ubuntu install (with apt) doesn't update on a hourly basis.
<niemeyer> mathiaz: It's a slightly different use case I guess
<mathiaz> niemeyer: right - if it makes a difference for landscape usability than a hourly cron job is the best option
<niemeyer> mathiaz: We can always fire APT/Synaptic/whatever and get the current infomration
<niemeyer> mathiaz: For a server-side solution that's not so practical
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<slangasek> hmm, on-demand triggering of an update check isn't possible?
<niemeyer> slangasek: It is definitely possible, but it's a bad UI
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<slangasek> ok. I imagine it would be a suboptimal user experience regardless, due to the latency of checking
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<niemeyer> slangasek: Try to imagine something like "The information you're looking at is 20h old. If you want to know the current updates, click on Update All Systems and come back in a few minutes."
<slangasek> right :)
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<pitti> re (sorry, got some spontaneous guests)
<slangasek> anyway, I'm certainly not arguing against the 1h cronjob

About smart using pkglist from apt, it may happen sometime in the future, but not now. I can imagine a few people becoming concerned if suddenly smart used apt's cache, or, as it would indeed happen, "smart update" also updated apt's cache. It would have to go both ways.

And remember that smart works with more package resolvers/systems than just apt/deb, so such a solution would probably be better if it were generalized.