gnome software shell search provider? [Re: Is Gnome Software ready for primetime?]

[Kevin Kofler]

Michael Scherer wrote:
> When statistics cost you money, yeah, I think that's important to take
> them in account. Maybe your employer do not care about this, but I
> strongly suspect mine does, and I strongly suspect that most companies
> do care about this as well.

Company computers should get updated only by the sysadmins (which AFAIK is 
how it works at his company, him being the CTO, sysadmin and lead developer 
in one person), or by automated scripts running as root (which is how it's 
done at my university, there's an autoupdate script running at bootup). 
Users have no business updating company-managed computers.

> Not to mention that basically, what you suggest is that the system
> bypass users explicit requests to shutdown, and that doesn't sound like
> a improvement to me ( and again, I say that also because that's what we
> tried at work, and this didn't work that well ).

Yet this is exactly how PackageKit deals with this for online updates.

> However, since you didn't explained at all what are the issues you are
> facing with the new approach, and since you have only explained how you
> are doing on your 20 servers ( which is totally unrelated to the
> question of desktops, BTW, and which would still be usable at your
> convenience on anything you maintain ), I am quite sceptic on your whole
> intervention.

The issues are that:
* updates require 2 reboots,
* you cannot use what you upgraded before doing the reboots,
* in particular, you cannot install new packages built against the updated
  ones before the reboots,
* security fixes also only take effect after the reboots.

It also violates the principle of least surprise.

        Kevin Kofler