Update notification period change

[Chuck Anderson]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 09:39:26AM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 07:50:29PM +0100, Michel Alexandre Salim wrote:
> > On 03/18/2011 06:29 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > Hey, folks. So, just wanted to kick off a discussion regarding this bug:
> > >
> > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=688305
> > >
> > > The default update notification period has been changed for GNOME in F15
> > > from 1 day to 1 week (security updates still get notifications
> > > immediately). This is a change that's come from upstream, the GNOME
> > > design team, who consider it a UI design issue. QA and FPL think this is
> > > at least partly a distro policy issue as well as / more than a UI design
> > > issue, and think we should consider whether we actually want to make
> > > this change for Fedora, and if so whether we should have a different
> > > update period for the pre-release cycle. QA certainly feels that 1 day
> > > is more appropriate than 1 week during pre-release time.

I agree. How else can this be tested effectively in a timely manner so 
we know for sure that this works properly?

> > Should we tie this with the Bodhi package acceptance criteria? e.g. on 
> > stable releases, maintainers have to wait a week before packages can be 
> > moved to the next stage, while in F-15 it's 3 days.
> > 
> > Then again, important fixes often get karma-promoted, and maybe we don't 
> > want to make testers wait for the entire duration. But they can always 
> > manually check for updates.
> 
> The Bodhi time limit seems orthogonal to me, since different testing
> packages are going to be available throughout any given 3-day cycle.
> 
> Altering this setting during the pre-release phase seems reasonable,
> similar to how we turn on debugging stuff in the kernel.  I don't see
> why this is a big policy discussion, it's simply something to make
> testing easier during a pre-release.  Could this setting be twiddled
> with a schema setting in the fedora-release package, so pre-releases
> would be a little chattier about updates up until the RC?
> 
> %if %{release} < 1
> gsettings do-something-magical-to-the-system-installed-schema
> %endif

I thought updates notification was broken and failed the QA Test Case 
because it took so long to happen:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=693251

> I don't think we should be reversing the GNOME upstream setting beyond
> the pre-release stage, i.e. for GA.  This setting should have minimal
> impact beyond casual users, since people doing development, QA,
> packaging, and other contribution (1) will find it simple to change
> their personal setting (or may already have done so); and (2) run yum
> often enough on their own that the PackageKit refresh module will make
> the change irrelevant to them anyway (right?).

I would argue that updates-testing should give more frequent 
notification, or bodhi acceptance criteria should be lengthened to 
accomodate the less frequent notification.

> Casual users will be affected in that their box won't be as chatty
> about non-critical updates.  A simple statement should be included in
> the Release Notes about the change.