Improving the offline updates user experience

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 08:48:59AM +0200, Miroslav Suchý wrote:
> >Offline updates are more for the cases where things need to be
> >reliable, because no well educated admin is available to instantly
> >fix things.
> 
> I will print it an pin up on my notice board.
> 
> And the implication is that offline updates are not for readers of
> devel at lists.fedoraproject.org

I don't think that's very fair, without the context. First, of course,
we're developing for more than just ourselves. And second, this isn't a
reversible statement: just because offline updates primarily target one
user type doesn't mean that other user types can't or shouldn't use it.

Why do I care about this? The non-techie user wants less rebooting too.
I'd love to see the updates toolchain get more smarts about recognizing
when an update is "safe" (or at least "safer") and not reboot in those
cases. That's possible but would be an investment of work. In the
meantime, "offline updates if you want simple and guaranteed", "use
yum or dnf online if you're able to handle unlikely but possible
consequences" seems workable enough.

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader