Goals for Fedora Workstation upgrades

Adam Batkin adam at batkin.net
Sun Oct 5 12:25:09 UTC 2014


On 10/05/2014 01:55 AM, drago01 wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 2:40 AM, Adam Batkin <adam at batkin.net> wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> 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").
>
> The point of the an upgrade is that it is an automated process. Asking
> the user to do "x and y" afterwards is not really an option.
> It's pushing the burden to the user.

That's the argument for automatically upgrading "certain system-level 
things". My point is that an upgrade shouldn't touch anything at the 
application level. Don't touch text editors, web browsers, e-mail 
clients, compilers, scripting languages, etc... The only exception being 
if it's a requirement for something else in the platform (i.e. you 
didn't have ruby installed before, but it's a requirement for some 
system level script, so now it will be installed).

-Adam Batkin



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