2015-08-31 17:45 GMT+02:00 Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org>:
> Philip Hands <p...@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 out of date system.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
