As the maintainer of the (recently added to SL) yum-cron package, let me chip in my $0.02. yum-cron developed in parallel to SL's yum-autoupdate. It became a fedora-extras/EPEL package when yum-updatesd was introduced, since the updatesd daemon was a) horribly buggy; and b) made no sense unless the machine was a dedicated desktop box that needed a blinky "updates ready" button. yum-updated has gotten better over time, although I'm not sure which version (horribly broken or ok) is part of RHEL. Certainly one doesn't need a daemon running all the time for many of the SL use-cases. yum-cron has evolved some to be more configurable and more bulletproof, but has more or less the same functionality as SL's yum-autoupdater. In fact, the two packages likely have file conflicts, so you should only install one of them at a time. So a hard requirement by yum for yum-autoupdater would make using yum-cron impossible, although I haven't tried yum-cron on SL in order to run down the file conflicts. Regardless of your update preferences, a distro needs some form auto-updating turned on by default. Anyone with strong opinions about how updates should work also knows enough to turn them off or customize them. Anyone without that knowledge is the sort of user whom we want to make sure is getting security patches automagically, since they're also likely not paying attention to bug reports and threat warnings. Alec -- Alec Habig, University of Minnesota Duluth Physics Dept. [log in to unmask] http://neutrino.d.umn.edu/~habig/