On Fri, 13 Jul 2012 10:30:12 +0100, Winnie Lacesso
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>What is the difference between the packages yum-autoupdate and yum-cron?
>
>rpm -qi yum -cron says "Install this package if you want auto yum updates
>nightly via cron."
>
>rpm -qi yum-autoupdate says "Automatically update your machine daily via
>yum."
>
>The 2 pkgs seem to do the same thing (I just got bit by an automatic
>update when I knew yum-cron had not been installed). Apols for not having
>time to dig, but do experts know the few-sentence summary of the
>differences between these 2 pkgs?

Not an expert, but recently had the same question and looked into it a bit.
As far as I can see, the main difference is in the way you manage the
behaviour of the two packages.  yum-cron has an /etc/sysconfig/yum-cron file
in which you set variables for whether you want automatic updates or just a
list of packages available for update or nothing at all, while
cron-autoupdate has separate files, /etc/yum.d/original.yum.cron,
/etc/yum.d/checkonly.yum.cron, /etc/yum.d/byhand.yum.cron that you copy or
link into
/etc/cron.daily to get the behaviour you want.

yum-autoupdate also has a /etc/yum.d/yum.cron.excludes file in which you can
specify packages that you don't want automatically updated, or reported on.
 I don't know whether there's a way of getting that effect in yum-cron.

yum-cron calls the file it puts in /etc/cron.daily yum-cron, while
yum-autoupdate uses yum.cron (hyphen versus dot) so that you can have both
packages installed at the same time, although I can't see why anyone would
want to.

Hope that's helpful.