Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 5:10 AM, Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Are there any problems with enabling automatic updates by default?
>> Most users don't care about updates to the point that they never
>> install them. And even if they would open the update manager, they
>> would more likely just install all updates than select the updates
>> they want. Hell, that's the way I work! How many people actually
>> benefit from any interaction with the update manager?

We may not want to automatically install updates when on a mobile
connection that charges "just a few cents per kilobyte".

> The only trouble is that some updates stop services.  Hal may need to be
> restarted,

If we wait till the computer is idle, how likely is this to cause your
average desktop user any problems?

> and if Firefox isn't restarted after an update it breaks royally.

Perhaps this could be considered a bug? I can see a few ways of fixing this
1) leave the previous version of Firefox installed, or
2) improve Firefox session management so that we can safely restart it
automatically (on idle).
3) change Firefox so it doesn't break so badly.

(Another suggestion was to only install updates on restart. However
this would slow down restart times, and wouldn't help users who do not
restart their computers)

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia