unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2009-07-04 at 10:15 +0200, Steve Dodier wrote:
> I don't think (b) is a good idea for the following reasons :
> 
>  * When the user shuts the PC down, he doesn't expect to give it
> attention anymore. An update can fail or be interrupted for some
> reasons (package missing on a server, internet connectivity broken,
> kernel upgrade asks if the menu.lst should be changed, etc). How do we
> let the user control the update process in these cases ? How do we
> make sure the user's attention isn't needed ?
>  * What about laptops ? Sometimes you shutdown your laptop because
> you're about to move. Do you want, in this case, to have to wait for
> the upgrade to perform ?
> 
> I'm not against the idea itself, but I think it should be an optional
> thing, not enabled by default.
> 
> SD.

Why is there an assumption that updates on shutdown would work like
Windows, where it basically tricks the user by doing that as a default?
There are much better ways to do this with the same functionality minus
the negatives, largely because we don't depend on it. (Thanks mostly to
cleverer file systems).

I think it makes a lot of sense to have a "Shut down when finished"
check box in the update progress bar, as well as an Update and Shut Down
option that the user can optionally choose when he is logging out. As an
alternative, the former could be replaced by a smarter log out process
that detects a running process like an update and waits for it to quit
before proceeding. This would remove the cruftiness of that first
solution and scale to other things, too.

Something really important to remember is that a cancelled update is a
really, really bad thing (for us and them). Thus, we should never risk
anything that would cause such behaviour. For example, I thought for a
second it would be cool to auto install updates at boot if they have
been downloaded already (like fsck), but it would not be safe to cancel
that (unlike fsck), triggering numerous loud exclamations of a rude word
that looks similar to the command.
With that in mind, I think automatic updates are evil (downloading them
isn't so much), but the benefits can be mostly obtained by giving the
user the right buttons to press.


For the rebooting end of things... how well is GNOME's session saving
working in 9.10? Perhaps the user's session after an update could be
saved, so when the system reboots he gets something reasonably close to
what he left. A hack to automatically log in could be interesting, too,
although possibly a security disaster. (I'm no security expert, so maybe
there's a good way to do it).


I also really love the gift icon. It's cute and meaningful. Although it
may be better suited to notification about new releases :)


-- 
Dylan McCall <DylanMcCall@xxxxxxxxx>

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