unity-design team mailing list archive

[Alex Launi <alex.launi@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.

<blur and wiggle dream sequence end style change>

Awesome, right?

-- 
--Alex Launi