"Update VM" in qubes-manager does not work for Fedora 21 TemplateVM

[Matt McCutchen]

After I upgraded my TemplateVM derived from the official Fedora 20 template to Fedora 21, the "Update VM" command in qubes-manager did not work: gpk-update-viewer showed no updates, though "yum distro-sync" did.  This appears to be because PackageKit has changed in Fedora 21 to use a different backend that does not honor yum.conf, so it does not use the updates proxy and its network connections get blocked.  See this complaint from a Fedora user about the divergence of package manager configuration files: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-January/205966.html .

I chose to change qubes-manager to call "gnome-terminal -e 'yum distro-sync'" instead of gpk-update-viewer as a short-term fix, since I'm currently using another tool that only works with yum and I know there are more changes to package management in Fedora 22.  If this is indeed a problem that will affect everyone upgrading from Fedora 20, please consider fixing it somehow so that they don't all waste time on the same troubleshooting.  (I haven't checked if there's a fix in the official Fedora 21 template.)

Thanks,
Matt

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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For the record: it is already reported here:
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/982

I've pasted your comment there. Thanks for the idea with yum in
terminal. It isn't ideal, because the command should work also on
Debian-based VMs. But it can be solved by introducing some qrexec
service for that (so the template VM can freely choose which tool should
be called there).

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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