Goals for Fedora Workstation upgrades

[Florian Müllner]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 8:59 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-10-03 at 13:50 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
>>  * 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:
>
> No, absolutely not. I disagree vehemently. See above. Upgrades must
> *never* remove a user's chosen applications.

I don't think it is entirely fair to consider applications that are
not installed explicitly by the user a choice - we picked it, not the
user. We don't even know if the user has used her "chosen application"
at least a single time - and if the user does not agree with the new
default, the previous one is just a simple reinstall away (in which
case the application's presence does become user configuration that
must be preserved on future updates).
There's probably some point in here in favor of keeping the list of
default applications small to encourage users to customize the set of
installed applications, rather than trying to cover as many use cases
as possible out of the box ...