Goals for Fedora Workstation upgrades

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 1:50 PM, Owen Taylor <otaylor at redhat.com> wrote:
> The discussion about F20 to F21 upgrades has been largely focused on the
> technolaogy - what will happen if we make package X depend on package Y
> and obsolete package Z. I understand the motivation behind wanting
> upgrades to be encoded in the package set and to keep special casing to
> a minimum. But I think we can't just shrug and consider that the end -
> we need to know what we are trying to achieve to figure out when we need
> to special case and do ugly things to get there.
>
> Before going too far into the practicalities of what we can achieve for
> Fedora 21, I decided try to write down what we'd want for F21 => F22 and
> beyond. I mean this to be Workstation specific - not apply to other
> products or non-productized installations of Fedora.
>
>  * The end result of an upgrade to F<n> must have all the packages that
> would have been installed  for a fresh install of F<n>
>
>  * In general, packages that were originally installed by default on the
> system, but no longer installed by default in F<n> should be removed.
> This may not always be practical, but after the upgrade:
>    - There must be no duplication of applications in system roles. For
> example, there must not be two character map applications
>    - There should be no left over system services started at boot
>  If a default application is removed without any replacement in the new
> default set (e.g. we stop installing an office suite), leaving the old
> application is acceptable.

I agree with Stephan on these points.  If we switch a default
application in a newer version of Workstation, we cannot simply remove
the old one during upgrades.  It breaks all kinds of workflow, and
there's really no point in forcing that on our users.

We can install the new application along side the old.  If we wanted
to be proactive about default changes, we could have firstboot (or
whatever it's called) run on the first login for each user and
highlight the new application changes and perhaps offer to switch the
default to the new one.

josh