Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> "Unwanted/non-user-intended network access" => Must be disabled by
> default and must explicitly activated by user action.
[snip]
> I for one consider the approach of background updating to be a
> conceptionally broken and flawed design, lacking generality and usability.
The same can really be said for ALL cron jobs. They all run some background
task the user didn't ask for and periodically consuming his/her resources,
usually when it's the least appropriate.
In most cases, the rationale is the same as here: optimizing interactive
performance by precomputing things in advance, see e.g. locate (mlocate, and
slocate before that) and prelink, which have been the subject of user
complaints for years. The only reason the complaints have stopped is because
the CPU and I/O abuse of those tasks is no longer that noticeable due to
Moore's law, but that also makes me wonder whether prelink is still useful
at all. (It also reduces security due to its negative impact on address
space randomization, and it's nasty in other ways, e.g. RPM has hacks to
unprelink on the fly for verification etc. Are a few microseconds at program
startup really worth all that?) As for mlocate, I uninstall that on all my
machines, the performance impact is just too big, I just perform a recursive
search when I need to find something.
Kevin Kofler
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