2.0 upgrade experiences

[Martin Pool]

2009/8/13 Robert Collins <robert.collins at canonical.com>:
> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 20:49 +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
>
>
>> I'd like to improve this by
>>
>> 1- Making the pack UI say something like this:
>>
>>   Packing repository ..../career
>>   5454MB in 12 packs....
>>   Thinking hard.....
(btw this really meant, shows a progress bar)
>>   Now 1230MB in 1 pack, and 5454MB in 12 obsolete packs that will be
>> deleted later
>
> This is more explicit about whats going on. It feels like exposing
> rather too much of the plumbing to me though :(. Most of our users won't
> know:
>  - what a pack means here

Perhaps we should omit the messages about the number of packs, but I
think showing the size is a basically reasonable thing to do, and
indeed useful regardless of this bug.

>  - how much later these obsolete packs will be deleted
>  - when its safe to delete manually.

Right, but this is something they want to know - at the moment they
only find out by filing a bug or asking on the list, and they're told
a complicated explanation.  If we can give good clear answers, great.
If we can't, at least giving some indication that this is normal is
better than nothing.

> SQL databases have a similar thing where temporary data causes disk
> space to grow, then shrink - and I haven't yet seen applications that
> build on them give me such warnings.

I think if they had say a vacuum operation and it caused disk usage to
grow, people would file similar bugs.

> I wonder what it is about our case that makes people so interested and
> concerned about this?

The announcements make a big deal about 2a being smaller!

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>