There should be an unattended upgrades service

Some users (want to) forget about regularly upgrading Guix System.

There should be an unattended upgrades service. Some requirements

come to mind for its configuration:

1) Some users may want their unattended upgrades service to take care

just of reconfiguring from a recent checkout and some may want it to

take care of updating users’ ~/.config/guix/current and ~/guix-profile

profiles.

2) Maybe there should be libnotify integration for unattended

upgrades if the user uses a desktop environment.

3) Updates may fail if there is no internet connection. Some users

may *not* want upgrades on metered internet connections. Some users

may *not* want upgrades over untrusted connections.

This report is a followup to Ludo’s proposal at

https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/36636 to add such a service and

add it to %desktop-services, making it the default setting. Such a

change in defaults could be a bad surprise for some users and should

not go unnoticed, I think.

Regards,

Florian

If an automatic updater is included by default (which I think would be a rather bad idea), it absolutely needs to be very easy for a user to disable.

GuixSD gives users a hell of a lot more control over the system and software and such than most other operating systems do, and that's a great strength. Leaving all those decisions in the hands of an automatic updating algorithm seems like a great way to discourage users from actually using the full power of the system and instead treat guix as just another generic distribution that decides things for the users instead of letting them decide for themselves. Especially since guix already lets the user know if it's older than about a week or so, which is probably plenty for anything other than the most demanding of security needs.

Further, an automatic upgrade service wouldn't really add anything useful, since cron jobs and scripts can already be used to automate upgrading if one so desires. Additionally, anyone who is able to install the system to begin with would easily be able to set up such a cron job if they wish, since creating the system config file takes more work than making a small bash script with the few commands needed to update everything.

Hi Matthew,

Of course. It would be as simple as removing a service from the list of

default system services in the operating system configuration.

I disagree. We provide a whole lot of services that aren’t strictly

necessary in order to satisfy what we think are reasonable user

expectations. An upgrade service that’s easily removed or configured

seems nicer to me than having to muck about with cron jobs and scripts

by myself.

--

Ricardo

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

I would most of all like to see a CVE-checking service that tells me

about security updates. Sometimes I’ll ignore updates for a few weeks

because I have a setup that absolutely must keep working, because I

could not even afford half an hour of brokenness, but I must still do

security updates, and I would like Guix to tell me about those.

Also it would be interesting to have an auto-update service that only

updates /run/current-system

That way users would only have to worry about their personal

installations, but not about the underlying base-system. I think there

are many users who would be most happy if they never had to sudo.

Best wishes,

Arne

--

Unpolitisch sein

heißt politisch sein

ohne es zu merken

This is just my opinions/ideas:

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 02:29:07AM -0500, Matthew Brooks wrote:

Guix System should target non-power users too. It is already much

easier to install packages and services than in Debian, especially if

no sudo were ever needed as Arne wrote in his reply.

Perhaps if the unattended upgrades service were not included in

%desktop-services but selectable in the Guix System graphical

installer and selected by default, users would feel more in control

and existing users would not be surprised.

If unattended-upgrades-service-type checked with NetworkManager for

metered connections *and* if substitutes are available *and* the power

user can configure a blacklist/whitelist of trusted connections, the

only downside I see is less internet bandwidth during upgrades and

slightly more battery drain, but security is more important and the

more responsible default.

Maybe make it configurable if upgrades should be performed when on

battery.

Maybe users could stop an upgrade via libnotify notification?

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 03:23:35PM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

A CVE notification service would be right for %desktop-services, I

think.

Regards,

Florian

Hi,

Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> skribis:

Yes, that’s what we’re talking about here, or at least what I had in

mind. :-)

Ludo’.

One was added by Ludo' in commit

79501f26ab6d82c0256ff786a5dfb0000b52ccd3.

The unrelated (CVE) or enhancement (NM integration) suggestions

upthread are separate topics. Closing!

Kind regards,

T G-R