Broken from the "Summary of Reddit thread". Fedora's lack of a graphical major-version updater comes up constantly. I think it's probably time to start brainstorming how to solve it, with a stated intention of having things work for upgrading Fedora 23 -> Fedora 24 *at minimum* and an ideal situation of having Fedora 22 -> Fedora 23 upgrades work (with changes made during Fedora 22's stable lifecycle to support this). So to brainstorm, I'll start with a list (in no particular order) of things I think we want as goals (not necessary technical goals but user experience goals) and then go into a few known technical enhancements that need to be accomplished to get there. (Note: many of the experience goals may already be possible with some combination of GNOME Software and/or fedup, but they are included for completeness). Much discussion welcome! p.s. I am not a member of the Workstation WG, but I am a highly- interested party. == User Experience Goals == * The user must be informed that a major-version upgrade is available soon[1] after it is released in a manner that is consistent with the integrated operation of the system. * The user must have the option to "snooze" this notification for a sensible amount of time (or permanently) to avoid nag. * The mechanism must be capable of informing the user of how much disk space will be required to perform the update prior to their initiating one. * The upgrade mechanism must *not* download any files other than metadata prior to a user request for upgrading. * The upgrade mechanism, once requested, must download all packages to be upgraded locally before starting (to avoid network issues in the middle of the upgrade process). * The distribution upgrade mechanism *must* take place in a dedicated upgrade environment with no other services running. * The updater must be capable of first updating *itself* to the latest stable version prior to attempting an upgrade. This *may* also require updating all packages on the local system to their latest versions, if needed. * The resultant state of the machine after an upgrade should be equivalent[1] to a freshly-installed system of the new version, configured the same way as the previous version. * Once the system has entered the dedicated environment, the updater should[2] complete successfully or else make no changes to the installed system, when only Fedora repositories are enabled. * The update notification should be configurable to support upgrades to Alpha and Beta releases, if desired. == Non-goals == * It is not a requirement to be able to downgrade from a successful distribution upgrade. == Technical implementation thoughts == * For Fedora Workstation, the obvious graphical front-end should be GNOME Software * ... However, the low-level should be implemented by PackageKit so that other DEs can implement their own solutions. * The fedup tool already provides a non-graphical implementation of the dedicated upgrade environment (as well as some odds-and-ends for managing changes that aren't handled by simple package upgrade scripts). This logic should be moved to PackageKit and maintained there, with fedup becoming a CLI client implementation of it. * The Fedora infrastructure would need to add new metadata to describe releases (also supporting Alpha and Beta releases) that the upgrade mechanisms may query for. Mirror-manager is probably a good place for this. * From a user perspective, GNOME software should provide AppStream metadata for a Fedora N+1 package, which would have special properties of enabling the distribution-upgrade. (Modeled somewhat after OSX upgrades which are done by "purchasing" the new version in their OSX app store) * When the user receives a notification for a distribution upgrade, clicking on that notification should bring them to the upgrade entry in GNOME Software (or other tool as appropriate to other spins). [1] Definition malleable. [2] I hate the word "should", but I don't want *every* edge case as a bug here.
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