Goals for Fedora Workstation upgrades

[Adam Batkin]

On 10/03/2014 09:10 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 08:58:30PM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> Um... except the cases where the new application keeps it's own
>> directory of caches and such.  Think of evolution vs. thunderbird.
>> I'd be really upset if an upgrade resulted in me going to start my
>> email and having to either a) redownload all the headers and messages
>> into a new cache or b) dig around for an app in the software center
>> that I was perfectly happy using.
>
> 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?

As a long time Red Hat/Fedora user, my expectation is that an upgrade 
will bring in newer versions of things (and any of their dependencies 
that are *required* for their operation) but otherwise leave my system 
alone. Remember, my system already works the way I want. Please don't 
break that.

An argument could be made that certain system-level things may need to 
change, especially if the old one is going to be abandoned (like moving 
boot loaders or init systems) but even then, I always read the release 
notes, so as long as it is clearly noted and the user is given an 
upgrade path ("to switch to the new default X subsystem, uninstall Y and 
install Z and run this configuration migration script").

-Adam Batkin