Ben Cotton wrote:
> ...changes in default behavior, when 1. technically reasonable and 2.
> not explicitly overridden by the user, should generally be made on
> upgrade.
I disagree. Upgrades should be as unsurprising as possible and keep user
configuration as much as possible. Changes in defaults should normally
(i.e., where technically reasonable) only be done for new installs. For
upgrades, any changes should normally be opt-in, not opt-out.
> Distributions are supposed to be opinionated
No, absolutely not. Distributions are supposed to be at the users' service,
not the other way round.
> and in cases where the user has accepted our opinion, we should do our
> best to provide it whether the system in question is an upgrade or a fresh
> install.
But as you state it:
> The difficulty here is cases where the user also has an opinion that
> formerly aligned with the distribution's opinion and no longer does.
Just because the user agreed with your former opinion does not mean they
will agree with you making a U-turn on it as well.
And please note that this is NOT about my personal editor preference: I
personally think nano is the much more user-friendly editor and my vi
knowledge is limited to ":q!". So I think the new default definitely makes
sense, for new installations, and I'll happily take the opt-in when I
upgrade my systems. (I rarely use the default editor because I mostly use
GUIs, so I usually just temporarily override EDITOR to something sane,
usually kwrite because I'm in a GUI environment, and have never bothered
actually setting EDITOR systemwide.) I just do not agree that the default
editor should be forcefully changed for all existing installations. Also
because, each time I upgrade Fedora, I routinely have to go through the list
of Changes and undo whatever can be undone.
> In most cases, the benefits to a consistent experience outweigh the
> detriments of the user having to explicitly override an opinion.
I think not making surprising changes to existing installations is more
important than consistency between old/upgraded and new installations.
> (I include the phrase "technically reasonable" above to account for
> cases like changing the default file system, which is not something
> you'd particularly want to try changing on existing systems at upgrade
> time)
Of course, my opposite opinion should be understood with the same
limitation: Sometimes it is just not technically reasonable to keep
supporting the old default, e.g., if it depends on some software package
that is no longer maintained upstream. (E.g., I am NOT proposing that the
KDE Spin should keep defaulting to Plasma 5 for upgrades after Plasma 6 is
out, that would make no sense.) But where it is technically reasonable,
changes should always be opt-in, not opt-out, for upgrades.
Kevin Kofler
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