unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm just catching up on this thread, and want to help draw it to a
conclusion.

Updates-on-login are interesting, but I think fatally flawed because of
the common requirement to reboot after updates.

Updates are an irritation and interruption at any time, we must accept
that. I've seen people say "I generally prefer for XXX to happen
immediately" whether XXX is login, shutdown, boot or restart. There's no
good time to offer the updates.

What we can do is to make sure updates are bulletproof (thank you to the
Ubuntu Platform team for their hard work on  SRU's) and that updates
don't need to ask questions. We can also come up with good solutions to
the problems that some apps have if they are running during an update,
such as Firefox and Mozilla. Both of them can now statefully be
restarted, we should consider doing that as part of the update.

My guidance is to do (a) updates in-session well, and (b)
updates-on-shutdown, on the basis that the former can be scheduled by
the user between work, and the latter at least comes at a time when the
user is moving their attention away from the desktop.

I also very much like the rebranding of updates as gifts! Let's run with
that.

Mark

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature