Graphical Distribution Upgrades

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 7:42 AM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at gnome.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-04-08 at 09:52 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> Is this really a good use of development resources?  I mean,
>> really—if
>> developers are the primary user group, is it unreasonable to expect
>> that they will use a shell once or twice per year to perform the
>> upgrades?
>
> Even if we only cared about developers, I would say that I do not
> expect developers to use the terminal or to know that fedup exists.
> But this is the beginning of the PRD we agreed on:
>
> "We want to create a stable, integrated, polished and user friendly
> system that can appeal to a wide general audience. The Fedora
> Workstation working group will have a special focus on providing a
> platform for development of various types of applications."
>
> Developers are a "special focus" and that warrants making some
> decisions that we wouldn't otherwise, e.g. I'm interested in
> installing more command-line development tools like gcc by default.
> But it would be a mistake to take this so far that we compromise user-
> friendliness or our appeal to a "wide, general audience." That's one
> of the reasons that developers are using Macs instead of Fedora, after
> all.

The #1 thing Apple does to achieve polish is say no. This is so
pervasive it's thematic. But constraining the context to install,
updates, and upgrades, both Apple and users gain a lot through simply
having less.

~ 90% of Custom partitioning is incompatible with stable, integrated,
polished, and user friendly. It's a massive amount of feature sprawl,
permitting arbitrary layouts that bind the bootloader, the user,
backup/restore software, offline updates, and fedup upgrades, into
understanding and supporting. There are nearly endless bugs in this
area.

Much of what custom permits, binds us to one of two choices:
supporting arbitrary layouts, or broken functionality as a result of
them. And I've lost count how many of these bugs I've filed, let alone
how many I keep running into and just don't have the will power to
keep filing because so many keep getting marked as not bugs, or not a
priority to ever fix.

Windows and Android do stateless better. Apple does updates, backup
and restore better. Their approaches are completely different in this
area, except with one respect: they both have a lot of discipline to
just say no. So there's room for Fedora to be different and better
than OS X or Windows in this area, but not until we create a spec or
standard and stop giving users razor blades and telling them to go
play on the freeway.

And that spec/standard's mandate would be looking at a dozen packages,
how they all affect each other in terms of UI/UX and how to constrain
what's permitted up front, in order to gain stable, user friendly,
polish at the back end as a result of sane focus.


-- 
Chris Murphy