On 1/6/25 03:50, John Scott wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking to help a couple people I know personally get up and running with
Debian very soon, and I hope to help many more. Speaking from experience, my
primary concern is that Debian on the desktop does not notify users at all when
a new release is made or when the current release is losing support. PackageKit
does a great job at handling ordinary package upgrades for users such as
through GNOME Software, but although I think PackageKit has bits to help users
with release upgrades (or at least to inform them of such), I don't believe the
Debian-specific bits have been implemented to support this.
I was surveying the state of the art and https://wiki.debian.org/AutomatedUpgrade#line-14 explains
this well. As recently as last year I had a comrade still running Debian 8 from many years ago,
simply because "no news is good news". That wiki page is concerned with automating the
upgrade process so it's less manual. My current priority is much smaller: my buddies could simply
use notifications on the lock screen or elsewhere that say "Debian 256 is out; check out the
release notes or poke John to plan an upgrade at your convenience."
The bits are already there: with PackageKit aside, distro-info, base-files, and
the debian-security-support packages all have (or can get) machine-readable
information that can help facilitate this. libnotify or setting a parameter in
GDM can display notifications on the desktop (a systemd timer and/or
xdg-autostart for login?) or lock screen respectively. It seems like this
problem is probably tractable but I'll need to write my own code to glue
everything together.
I guess my question is, do I understand everything right? Does anyone have a
more ready-made solution to solve this need? If not, that's not a big problem—I
just want to stay close to the state-of-the-art.
Thanks
I do not understand why a subscription to the announce list
(https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/debian-announce) would not suffice.
..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............
