From what we were talking about at the staff meeting on Friday: Downloading a package through Software Update and then installing it later from the local package you downloaded doesn't work if you quit Software Update in between downloading and installing. It does work if you don't quit in between.

The command line utility is a little funky. There are commands listed in the help page (softwareupdate -h) that are not listed in the man page, so I can't quite tell what they might do.

Additionally frustrating is that there is a -d command to download a package, but the download doesn't seem to work, whether I'm logged in as just an admin user, or whether I sudo the command. Notes on macosxhints indicate that the package is downloaded, even though an error shows up. But it's not downloaded to the correct location (/Library/Packages), and the utility does not recognize the package exists locally when trying to then install that update. So it certainly doesn't do what we want it to do.

There's a possibility, I guess, of having Software Update run weekly, with the option checked "Download important updates in the background". But at 2x4 we have not allowed users to have admin access, which means when those packages have been downloaded and are ready to install, users there won't be able to complete the task. If they quit Software Update at that point, I think we're back to square one (though I haven't tested this).

So could we have the Macktez user run this function? There are a couple problems that already come to mind. First, relying on the admin account being logged in (with Fast User Switching) at all times means that a standard user would never be able to restart their own computer -- since an admin password is required to log out other users. Second, I've seen alerts like Software Update's in one background user slow things down for the user in the foreground -- if you check processes that are running, you'll see Login Window taking up a lot of CPU power.

I wouldn't want to leave our standard user in either of these crippled positions.

So what can we do?