unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martín Soto <donsoto@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 10:01 PM, David Siegel
<david.siegel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> I am glad this is being explored. I originally suggested we consider
> updates at GDM (1) to challenge our thinking about this problem through
> inversion, and (2) to rebrand updates as something fun and exciting to
> receive, not a system maintenance chore that takes place during a dark
> shutdown scenario.


I find this idea laudable, but I wonder how viable it is. The type of
updates we are talking about are a chore, because they are exclusively aimed
at closing security holes and fixing critical bugs. It is not that we are
going to the user with a smile and bag of assorted goodies. It's rather like
we're suddenly knocking at his door and telling him "we just noticed there's
a big hole in your roof and, unless you let us do our work ASAP, it'll soon
start raining in your living room." In a way, it's not that bad: We're
pointing out a serious problem (if it isn't serious, why are we releasing
updates anyway?) and offering a solution free of charge, but he must be
bothered to open his door and let us mess around for a while.

Trying to hide this reality behind a nice present icon sounds kind of sneaky
to me. Sort of if I give you a mop wrapped in colorful present paper, in the
hope that you clean my floor with it. My strategy would be to be honest and
make it clear that this is a chore, that, as any other chore, must be
completed rather sooner than later. We understand, however, that the user
may have something urgent going on and may not be able to do it right now,
but we'll keep insisting.


> Also, we do fsck at boot, so bookending the user experience with two
> drawn-out, systemic maintenance tasks seemed very imposing.
>
> We should definitely consider as many update scenarios as possible in order
> to find the one that users will prefer. We are very quick to start
> implementing updates and shut down without considering something radically
> different because many of us have experiences updates at shutdown when using
> Windows. Neither solution is perfect, both have their merits, and this is
> the perfect place to discuss them.


Agreed. Recent answers in this thread show that updates at login, at logout,
or at some point in-between may be appropriate depending on the user and
situation. How about using them all?

But before we move into that, let me pose a more basic question. How
important is it for the Ubuntu community that users install their updates in
a timely fashion? I ask this because I think that no technical solution will
work unless the community stands behind it. Any attempt at getting users to
install their updates will involve a certain degree of pestering, which, in
turn, will result in negative reactions from at least some people. It is
important that the community has a consistent, friendly and, above all,
positive answer for these people.

I can think of all sort of arguments that can be presented positively,
ranging from "we're making sure that your valuable data is safe" to "we are
good Internet citizens and want to make sure that Ubuntu is no place for
botnets and malware to flourish." Once we have some basic agreement about
this point, we can think of ways of pestering people in the less "pestery"
way possible ;-)

Cheers,

M. S.