Question about apple updates with images

[mosen]

Hi guys,

I was thinking, is it possible to automate the checking & downloading of apple software updates for a particular image?

The reason i ask is that I had an idea to just chroot softwareupdate into the mounted image to check for any updates to that image, but it doesn’t seem to work. There are scripts floating around on the net that do exactly the same thing – chroot softwareupdate.. and the comments in the scripts seem to indicate that it did work at one point (maybe 10.3 era?).

Any ideas?

[jasonpgignac]

Just to check that I understand – you’re writing a launch daemon or something that starts softwareupdate, as root, right? Are you waiting long enough on first boot to let the network card initialize? Or putting in a test to see if there is a net address yet?

[larkost]

Since we are in the InstaDMG forum, I would guess that he is looking to auto-update the image he is building during an InstaDMG run. I played around a little bit with chroots for InstaDMG for another purpose, and found that the installer was able to walk right out of one without blinking (this is actually a known limitation of chroots for root). I would suspect that systemupdater would do the same thing.

There is also the large issue that SoftwareUpdate pulls down non-Combo updates (that is good for individual computers, bad for imaging). This issue is probably a deal-breaker for actually using softwareupdate.

I also have reservations about an automated system for doing this at all. One of the really nice things about the workflow is that you wind up with an image that you can trust (this assumes that you are making incremental changes on an image you trust). If you were to use softwareupdaate to update things you would have untrusted things in there constantly, and could have various things depending on network conditions while you were working. I worked on InstaUp2Date with the idea that users could share a common few base images, meaning that all of us would be able to test and troubleshoot those images collectively while then putting our own bits on top of that image. Most of the ease of update, and more of the testing.

[mosen]

You are right larkost. I wanted to make the updates semi-automated, or at least have some way of checking pending updates to an InstaDMG build. Its true that a lot of the updates have machine specific requirements etc.. so I can put up with the manual process :).

It’s a shame these apps can’t be chrooted, as chrooting SystemPreferences would be a nice way of creating a set of plists for distribution.

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