Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft

[Alberto Ruiz]

Hi Adam,

On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 09:23 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 13:59 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
> wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> > First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling
> > non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers.
> > While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to
> > take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the
> > future work of the working group.
> > 
> > Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the
> > first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to
> > include spelling fixes contributed and so on. 
> > 
> > We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
> > 
> > Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback
> > or if further clarifications are needed.
> 
> "Upgrading the system multiple times through the upgrade process should
> give a result that is the same as an original install of Fedora
> Workstation."
> 
> Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and
> OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely
> unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in
> existence which actually achieves this.

Citation needed? Windows Mobile, Android, iOS, PlayStation 3, XBox... I
never heard any users of these OSes complaining about how upgrades broke
their system in an ongoing basis. Yes, maybe from time to time, somebody
hits a problem there, but the upgrade process in those systems is pretty
robust due to several design decisions.

>  Even cellphone manufacturers -
> who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with,
> and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we
> have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and
> centre in a foundational document without some really convincing
> evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.

Again, I've never had an issue upgrading my PS3, Android phone or my
iPad, and I don't know of anyone who had major issues with upgrades
other than having to get used to UI changes (not even with Cyanogenmod
which is community driven).

Also, upgrades were never much of an issue for the Ubuntu user
(disclaimer: I used to work for Canonical), whereas this is a common
complaint about Fedora (I had many issues on every single upgrade of
Fedora I've performed).

The fact that we may not achieve this goal in a 100% flawless fashion
doesn't mean we have to give up on it altogether, the room for
improvement here is huge, and anything we can do to make this better is
worth every line of code. This problem is a major scare-away for many
users.

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz