Future of panel applets

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 14:14 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> Hi Seth,
> 
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 1:48 PM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >
> > So - there's a way for firefox to know that plugins are non-essential
> > and to ignore them in an upgrade. That they are plugins.
> >
> > There's no way for yum to know that an applet is not essential. We have
> > no information to use to determine that 'if an update is being held up
> > by an applet remove the applet'.
> 
> I understand all the details of how things are currently implemented
> today =)  I'm just trying to look at it more from a UX perspective;
> basically the intersection of what would be a good experience and how
> hard it would be to implement.
> 
> > that's what the obsoletes info is providing - that hint.
> 
> I get that.  But the point I was trying to make is that in this case
> the user chose explicitly to install something over the base (similar
> to Firefox) and we're just silently removing it (not like Firefox).
> It's hard to see how to do better though without categorizing packages
> and fixing the upgrade process to understand how to treat packages
> differently.

well, in some of these cases the user choise it over base - in other
cases they installed it from base - as part of the normal install
process.

Are you saying that we need something in the process which leaves an
applet which CANNOT run in place?

the advantage of obsoletes is that the user can look up what nuked their
package and they are TOLD about it in the yum output and in yum history.

-sv