On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 5:06 PM, tacone <tacone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Good intent, bad idea.
I disagree, let's imagine this scenario, together... <blur and wiggle dream sequence style scene change>
It's Tuesday morning, you get up and turn on your computer. Whilst you were fast asleep dreaming of sugar plums and sexy librarians Ubuntu packagers were hard at work packaging updates for your favourite operating system. Now that it's morning, these updates are available, for you! You boot up and arrive at the slick new GDM. But what's this message?
"New updates available! Click here to install"
Some days you're very busy, and need your computer right away so you chose to ignore them and log right in. That's ok, they'll be available when you're ready. Update Manager shouldn't go away, you should be able to launch it yourself manually if you want to update once you've logged in and found out that DST was this weekend and you've got some extra time.
But today you decide to click. The interface changes nicely into a screen displaying what updates are available, and asking for your username and password to authorize install / log in. If you're not an administrator we will politely tell you that you can't perform an upgrade, and that you should let your administrator know that your system needs some updates. At this point we just finish the login, since you just gave us your info. Awesome.
Now let's say you are an admin, this update requires no reboot so we log you right in, and when the desktop is loaded there is already a dialog waiting giving you the progress of your update. You may continue working, you weren't cost much time, and your system is fully secure because you're up to date.
But next time there might be a kernel upgrade, which will require a restart. In this case we should ask the user what they'd like to do. In some cases the estimated time to finish (which we will show) may only be 2 minutes, and we can afford that so we just halt the login and modally install the upgrades, or we allow them to say "ok i recognize that this update will need a restart to apply, but I need my computer- so lets continue like there are no updates that require a reboot, and I will reboot when I'm ready.