Standards/Zypp Updates Status Xml

From openSUSE

Version: 10.2

This spec was introduced with opensuse-updater applet, which appeared in version 10.2

Version: 10.3

This spec has been extended for 10.3. see: zypper xml

Objective

• User applications, applets and others may want to display the user the number of available updates.
• Automated programs may want to monitor the availability of new updates and notifiy somebody.
• CIM providers may want to expose this information to CIM clients.

Design

• To refresh the system sources you need root permissions. So the wrapper program has root permissions.
• All the logic is in the helper program, refreshing, caching.
• The helper is smart and will show cached results if possible.
• The helper outputs xml.
• YaST is who actually performs the task of updating. As YaST has cross dektop support, this is actually what we want.

Benefits

• Consumers take advantage of the zypp solver for patch calculation.
• No need to link against zypp
• Launching the helper every X time and parsing the output is all you need.

Specification

If you want to show the available updates (patches) from your system run:

/usr/sbin/zypp-checkpatches-wrapper

Ths is a SUID program, which will refresh system sources and calculate the patch level. The output is an XML file, which is cached in /var/lib/zypp/cache/updates_result.xml

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<update-status version="0.4">
 <errors>
  <error>Some error during calculation happened</error>
 </errors>
 <update-sources>
  <source url="http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/suse/update/10.1" alias="http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/suse/update/10.1"/>
 </update-sources>
 <update-list>
 <update category="security" name="java-1_5_0-sun" edition="1438-0">
 <summary>SUN Java packages prior 1.5.0 update 7 allow DOS.</summary>
 <description>Sun Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.5.0_6 and earlier, JDK
1.5.0_6 and earlier, and SDK 1.5.0_6 and earlier allows
remote attackers to cause a denial of service (disk
consumption) by using the Font.createFont function to
create temporary files of arbitrary size in the %temp%
directory (CVE-2006-2426).
</description>
<source url="http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/suse/update/10.1" alias="http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/suse/update/10.1"/>
</update>
 </update-list>
 <update-summary total="1" security="1"/>
</update-status>

Once you parse the list and display it to the user, you can call yast2 online_update to start an update, or yast2 inst_source (use su if you are not root) to edit the catalogs.