Re: Announcing apt-watch: a Gnome 2 panel applet to check for upgrades
On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 04:51:04PM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Why is this bad, exactly?
>
Because it is especially obnoxious, and inappropriate if the user is
using the unstable or testing distribution. For instance, if the applet
blinks at me to update and I don't already know that... say console-data is
broken, then when I update the system I get broken packages. This would
have been catastophic to the unstable user if they did this during the
early part of the GNOME 2 transition. Still yet there are problems with
new versions of GNOME 2 and updating immediately is not always advised.
This can be said for any number of packages that are uploaded.
However using this little applet to watch for security updates to
stable makes great sense. Thus it makes great sense to use some sort of
noticably red icon in place of a blinking one. Like a big red warning
sign you would normally see along the road.
Happy Holidays,
Matthew McGuire
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