On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 05:10:24PM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Florian Müllner
<fmuellner(a)gnome.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 8:59 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
>> On Fri, 2014-10-03 at 13:50 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
>>> * In general, packages that were originally installed by default on the
>>> system, but no longer installed by default in F<n> should be removed.
>>> This may not always be practical, but after the upgrade:
>>
>> No, absolutely not. I disagree vehemently. See above. Upgrades must
>> *never* remove a user's chosen applications.
>
> I don't think it is entirely fair to consider applications that are
> not installed explicitly by the user a choice - we picked it, not the
> user. We don't even know if the user has used her "chosen
application"
> at least a single time - and if the user does not agree with the new
> default, the previous one is just a simple reinstall away (in which
> case the application's presence does become user configuration that
> must be preserved on future updates).
Right. It's the "we don't know" part that makes it unacceptable. If
we've done a good job at picking defaults, then we're going to assume
the users are actually using them. If they aren't we have no way of
telling so it's not safe to just remove the application.
If we did have a way to track how many times an application has been
opened while we upgrade, that might make things easier to deal with.
The score from ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/application_state would be
useful there, if someone figured out a way to sum over the various
$HOME for multi-user.
> There's probably some point in here in favor of keeping the
list of
> default applications small to encourage users to customize the set of
> installed applications, rather than trying to cover as many use cases
> as possible out of the box ...
Yes, agreed. And if we switch applications for a particular task, it
should be done with great care and planning to minimize any impact on
a user's workflow. Sometimes you have to break things, but that
should be very very seldom.
--
Paul W. Frields
http://paul.frields.org/
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