At FUDCon, Christopher Aillon and Jon McCann gave an interesting talk on the Fedora software update/installation experience. Bill Nottingham and I were present, but given that other Board members have had questions about this talk, I wanted to bubble this topic up for some more attention. I'm not sure how many other Board or FESCo members were in attendance; there were many compelling talks at FUDCon from which attendees had to choose. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperience I invited Jon to come to this week's Board meeting to basically give a slightly compressed version of the FUDCon talk, and for us to discuss how the ideas in that talk might impact groups across Fedora like QA, rel-eng, packagers, and others. The point of this meeting is for Board members to ask questions about, and understand, the whiteboard and its implications. >From reading the whiteboard, there's a decent amount of overlap with some of the efforts to improve Rawhide. Currently I think those are limited to making Rawhide more regularly installable, but we shouldn't avoid thinking about how to make Rawhide more regularly *usable* too. Christohper Aillon had also posted some thoughts earlier about the way the Mozilla sheriffs process results in a more usable nightly tip for products: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-October/msg00100.html Paul ----- Forwarded message from William Jon McCann <william.jon.mccann@xxxxxxxxx> ----- Hi, On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 10/16/2009 01:43 PM, William Jon McCann wrote: >> Hi Spot, >> >>>From an experience design perspective, here is the way I think it should be: >> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperience >> >> This set of requirements came out of discussions with members of QE, >> rel-eng, and Desktop. >> >> Comments? If we can agree on these goals then we just have to figure >> out how make them happen. > > Jon, > > This document... is a bit confusing to me honestly, because I'm not sure > that the terms used are defined effectively. What is a "System > Component"? When you refer to "the app they are using", are you talking > about PackageKit? Yum? XChat? A System Component at least to first approximation is anything that is not an Application. An Application is something like Firefox. A System Component is something like upstart. A rule of thumb may be that if we want something to have an identity then it is very likely an App. I realize that this is a very subtle distinction for many engineers. However, there is a very fundamental difference for users (and therefore for experience designers). > You mention integration tests, but provide no further vision there. Yeah hopefully the people that will be interested in doing this will have more input there. > I also tend to disagree with specific points, such as: > > * System updates may only be deferred for a short time after which they > will be installed automatically. > > (I don't think we ever want to force updates down our users throats, as > well intentioned as we may be. Then again, I might be confused because > you seem to differentiate between "System updates" and "Application > updates"). Yes, realizing the difference between System updates and Application updates is key to understanding this. > It sounds very much like you are advocating a "Service Pack" model, and > I'm not sure that is functionally sane or even desirable. No, it is not the same as a service pack really. > Then again, I could be reading this wrong. > > I think that in general, users only care about updates when they break > something. I'd rather focus on improving the quality (and decreasing the > quantity of) our updates than spend a lot of time worrying about > bundling and delivery times and locations. Hmm, I probably didn't do a very good job getting the point across in that page. I'm trying to describe the experience we want to provide from a design point of view. I don't think you have a chance of improving anything until you can consider an update to be more than just a new package. Jon ----- End forwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
