Bug#838734: [plasma-discover] plasma-discover uninstalls packages during upgrades without asking for confirmation

2016-09-25 Thread Matthias Klumpp
Discover is for end-users with no technical knowledge. Showing extra
dialog boxes with crazy text won't help and just be visual clitter,
since people will press "Yes" anyway. Also, Discover isn't really to
blame for the underlying problem, which is a busted archive, something
that never happens in any stable distribution.
However, it would be nice if Discover handled this situation better on
unstable development versions of a distro.

I see the following possible solutions:

1) Have Discover detect an unstable distribution, and if it finds one,
show an extra confirmation box if changes that cause the removal of a
package are detected.

2) Just display removals as seperate items in the updates list
unconditionally - people on unstable distros would just need to read
the information then.

3) Show a "This update is potentially disruptive if you are using an
unstable distribution" or any other meaningful message when big
changes are detected (e.g. > 10 packages being removed)

Since even on stable distros sometimes transitions happen and stuff
gets removed, adding an unconditional dialog seems like a bad idea,
simply because it's meaningless for average users.

I'll talk to the usability people about the different options, and
hopefully we can land one of them before Plasma 5.8 is released.

Cheers,
Matthias



Bug#838734: [plasma-discover] plasma-discover uninstalls packages during upgrades without asking for confirmation

2016-09-25 Thread Scott Kitterman
Thanks.

Another scenario to consider is a user that doesn't know any better enables a 
poorly maintained third party repository that contains conflicting packages 
that cause large numbers of removals.

This can happen post-release and is a scenario the user base you're targeting 
is particularly vulnerable to.

Scott K

On September 25, 2016 2:28:37 PM EDT, Matthias Klumpp  
wrote:
>Discover is for end-users with no technical knowledge. Showing extra
>dialog boxes with crazy text won't help and just be visual clitter,
>since people will press "Yes" anyway. Also, Discover isn't really to
>blame for the underlying problem, which is a busted archive, something
>that never happens in any stable distribution.
>However, it would be nice if Discover handled this situation better on
>unstable development versions of a distro.
>
>I see the following possible solutions:
>
>1) Have Discover detect an unstable distribution, and if it finds one,
>show an extra confirmation box if changes that cause the removal of a
>package are detected.
>
>2) Just display removals as seperate items in the updates list
>unconditionally - people on unstable distros would just need to read
>the information then.
>
>3) Show a "This update is potentially disruptive if you are using an
>unstable distribution" or any other meaningful message when big
>changes are detected (e.g. > 10 packages being removed)
>
>Since even on stable distros sometimes transitions happen and stuff
>gets removed, adding an unconditional dialog seems like a bad idea,
>simply because it's meaningless for average users.
>
>I'll talk to the usability people about the different options, and
>hopefully we can land one of them before Plasma 5.8 is released.
>
>Cheers,
>Matthias