Re: system upgrade by GNOME (was: system upgrade by systemd)

2015-08-31 17:45 GMT+02:00 Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>:

Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> writes:

> Is it not the case that we're actually witnessing is:

> Option e): get updates applied only at reboot, with no prior
> notification that they are available, such that people who always
> suspend, or simply leave systems running all the time get no updates
> until something bad happens, and they suffer a forced reboot.

> Consequences: Unexpected changes of behaviour which will give a false
> impression of being caused by reboots, leading to the impression that
> Debian cannot be trusted to maintain behaviour between boots. Often
> out of date system. Corrosive loss of user confidence, since they'll
> feel like they're not in charge A steady trickle of irrelevant bugs.

That this would happen with no prior notification or user approval is
absolutely a bug, which I believe everyone involved in this thread has
agreed about. I think I saw a message go by indicating that the bug was
already located and fixed.

Yes, offline-installations in GNOME happen only if the user explicitly triggers that.

And since this functionality is triggered by things high up in the stack, removing PackageKit is not really a great idea (since this will also prevent you from ever installing online-updates using a GUI).

Instead, just disable the feature.

Can we take a step back here and figure out what we're still arguing
about? I'm wondering if we may all be in vigorous agreement, except for
some disagreement over whether we like the GNOME UI for asking the user
whether they want this behavior.

The current issue seems to be the downloading of updates in the background, which indeed could become expensive.

I am a very strong opponent of the ask-user-about-each-and-everything approach. I don't think our users are idiots, but I do thing the system is there to serve the users and stay in the background as much as possible, which includes not nagging with questions but instead picking sane defaults which are suitable for most users.

The so-called power-users can still configure the system to their liking, while the average user doesn't need to care about all the technical details happening in the background.

That being said, I think showing the user that updates are being downloaded in the background with a nice explanation and an option to turn the (default-on) behavior off in the firstrun GNOME welcome dialog does make sense.

I can raise this upstream, if that hasn't been done already, and see what happens.

[...]
In particular, I think it's been pretty well-established in this thread
that the only involvement systemd has in the whole affair is making
available a mechanism for upgrade on reboot that GNOME is (so far as I'm
aware) the only consumer of, thus making the subject line a bit
misleading. I'm happy to let the systemd packagers decide whether it
makes sense to package that with systemd or separately; any bugs of
sufficient urgency to warrant a debate on debian-devel seem, to me at
least, to be in whatever makes use of that infrastructure without giving
the user enough advanced warning. Which, to repeat, appear to have
already been identified and fixed?

You are correct with that - although technically this is a feature of PackageKit, which did receive some support in systemd and Plymouth to work.

And again, it needs to be explicitly triggered by some component, and you can even use PolicyKit to restrict access to the methods triggering this even further.

Currently, only GNOME-Software makes use of this, while you can continue to use GNOME-PackageKit for doing online updates just as well.

One thing which really helps is interacting with upstream on this: We can complain loudly on debian-devel, nothing will change unless someone will actually write the code to implement a different solution or configuration option and takes that upstream.

Cheers,

Matthias