Re: Announcing apt-watch: a Gnome 2 panel applet to check for upgrades
On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 04:41:28PM +0100, Emile van Bergen <emile-deb@evbergen.xs4all.nl> was heard to say:
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 10:24:17AM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote:
>
> > - Icons are desperately needed. Currently the applet just prints
> > out some text indicating its state; I'd prefer something like:
> >
> > * Rotating arrows to indicate that it is presently checking for
> > new updates.
> >
> > * An icon, perhaps a flashing "!", to indicate that updates are
> > available.
>
> Whatever you do, don't do the flashing. Flashing and animating draw
> far too much attention; effectively this puts psychological pressure on
> people to update immediately, as soon as there's a release. That's
> uncalled for. It makes you feel you're neglecting something if you don't
> obey the exclamation mark immediately and update.
If people have only security.debian.org and the stable release (by
name) in their sources.list, putting some pressure on them to upgrade
is IMO a good thing.
I didn't mention this, but one long-term idea I wrote down for the
applet was to check whether any of the updates were security updates,
and only do the flashing/whatever in that case. Unfortunately, I don't
think this is possible -- you could check whether the source for the
update is security.d.o, but that's probably not sufficient.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| Genius may have its limitations, |
| but stupidity is not thus handicapped. |
\---------------------- A duck! -- http://www.python.org ---------------------/
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