Update notification period change

[Paul W. Frields]

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.
> >
> 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 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?).

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.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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