Goals for Fedora Workstation upgrades

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Fri, 2014-10-03 at 21:10 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> The example Owen gave was a character picker. Maybe there's a
> distinction
> to be made between apps which keep data and (meaningful) preferences,
> and
> ones that are just little utilities?

I'd rather distinguish between uninstallable core ("system") apps, and
other apps. Core apps are part of the operating system and we should
feel free to add and remove them during major upgrades. If the user
doesn't want his operating system to change, he shouldn't upgrade.

For non-core apps, like the aforementioned email clients, we may want to
be more cautious. I don't think it'd be unacceptable to remove non-core
apps if they were previously installed by default, but I'd rather leave
them alone. By definition, these apps are not part of the operating
system, so why should we bother changing them? They're just a starting
point that we hope users will find useful, and messing with them is more
likely to annoy than to relieve ("Oh I'm so glad that Evolution
disappeared when I upgraded to F23" seems less likely than the
opposite). (Another option would be to let users choose which apps to
keep when upgrading, like Josh mentioned.)

I'm curious if anyone else thinks this distinction is valuable.

Note that this plan would work better if the line between core and
non-core apps was less arbitrary. Firefox is a good default browser, but
I'd rather it not be considered an unremovable core component of the
operating system (those should not be branded!), so it shouldn't be
removed if e.g. Epiphany were to become core and be installed during an
upgrade. Removing Firefox is one of those changes that would be much
more likely to annoy than not. But swapping one unremovable app
(hypothetically, say gnome-system-log) for another (gnome-logs) would be
fine. We'd just need to be more careful with what is removable (orca?)
and what is not (gnome-dictionary?).

Michael
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