yum plugin suggestion or yum change?

[Michael Favia]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 12/5/05, Jack Tanner <ihok at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Think "Aunt Tillie". She's got one PC, not several. She just wants it to
>> be safe from the baddies on the intraweb. QA of an update at a time,
>> with individual QA of each dependency, is not something she is going to
>> do. The simple desktop use case is to turn on automated nightly updates,
>> and to let power users and sysadmins turn those off at their own risk.
>> "Partial" automated updates do make sense for this scenario.
> 
> What AT wants and what is a best practise for AT's situation are very
> different things.
> I understand that people "desire" the ability to have reliable
> automated updates that require absolutely no interaction with the
> system. I don't think this project can provide that facility
> "reliably" for the majority of users.  And if it automated updates
> can't be done reliably, then this project should instead focus on
> notification of updates and user initiated update pulls.
> 
> I am not convinced that partial updates are in AT's best
> interest...even though its desired.
> Allowing normal people to easily ignore errors will only serve to
> reduce the amount of error reporting that is occuring about package
> updates.  Letting users ignore errors by default even more so.   If
> partial updates can be accomplished with a click of a button, whatever
> dialog the AT oriented tool throws up about errors becomes nothing
> more than a nag dialog to click through. Turning update error dialogs
> into EULA-like nag windows that AT isn't going to read is not useful
> nor is it wise. If something unexpected happens AT needs to be told,
> and needs to be told how to contact people who can help her
> understand, report and resolve the problem.  What if the update that
> isn't being installed IS a security fix?  Since the tools have no
> ability to distinguish security updates from feature updates, how can
> it be safe to encourage AT ignore the problems?

Because if given the choice to do something confusing or nothing at all 
AT will do nothing at all (After all her system is working well right 
now according to her right?). I think this is pretty self evident in her 
lack of effort or unwillingness to enable auto updates from the 
beginning. If you want to auto report such hangups as dep resolutions 
then you might have a solution to your "missing data" assuming the users 
agree to such a policy. We dont want to force AT to submit bugreports. 
That really scares aunt tilly away from fedora.

I think we need to realize that there is a class of computer users that 
just want things to work and wont take action when they dont. The best 
option for these users is to provide them with at least partial updates 
to do what we can for them in an automated fashion. Not everyone is a 
computer enthusiast and i dont think we should ask them to become one to 
run fedora.

I'm not saying that this should be silent. AT should know something is 
wrong and the severity of it should increase with the amount of time 
that it persists. She knows to take her car into the repair shop if the 
engine light is on and i think we can manage the same effect on her 
computer.

Aunt tilly is only one class of user and she doent need to be involved 
in making these types of decisions. -mf