Michael Scherer wrote:
As i say, we mostly have a fleet of laptop, and of course, the
situation
would be different if this was a set of workstation, but alas, this is
not the case.
It's true that the problem is harder for laptops, which are often more
loosely administrated by necessity.
Then this mean there is a problem in dependency. If I install kevin-
simulator-1.0 that requires libmichael1.1 while libmichael1.0 is
installed, either it need it and it will pull it, or it doesn't need and
it will not pull it. This also ask the whole question of having non
compatible library, etc, but I think we already answered that question
with the update policy and need to keep a proper compatible ABI.
The update policy only requires BACKWARDS compatibility, i.e. that stuff
built against libmichael1.0 will also work against libmichael1.1 if the
latter is pushed as an update. For some libraries, it is totally impractical
to require FORWARD compatibility (i.e. requiring that stuff built against
libmichael1.1 will also run against libmichael1.0). So it is normal that
updates depend on earlier updates.
At least, the new system bring coherency, you know that everything is
up
to date after the reboot. And again, if you like the previous way, you
can still opt-out of the system.
The complaint in this thread is that GNOME Software does NOT allow you to
opt-out, you have to switch to completely different software if you want to
opt out of offline updates. (FYI, the plan for Apper upstream is to support
both online and offline updates (currently, it supports only online
updates), allowing the user to really opt-in or opt-out of offline updates.
On the Fedora KDE end, we will then probably ship offline updates as opt-
in/default-off rather than opt-out/default-on, at least that's our current
consensus.)
> It also violates the principle of least surprise.
In what way ? If the system clearly say "we are gonna need to reboot to
apply thoses updates", it is hard to say that you are surprised. And the
principe of least surprise would be violated if we didn't followed the
dominant paradigm, which is still windows afaik.
Even that "dominant paradigm" stopped requiring reboots for each and every
update eons ago. A user does not expect updates to require reboots, even
less a GNU/Linux user.
Kevin Kofler