Prevent people from updates with critical components

[Joachim Langenbach]

Good Morning all!

After last release update and time consuming error repairing, I've think about 
a system, to inform users with critical system components that an update is 
not recommended at their machine.

My thought was a system like the following one:

1. Provide a list of kown critical components and their problems
2. Check the list before update and inform the user that critical components 
are present and that the system doesn't work properly after update
3. If the user wants, do the update
4. Inform the user, if an update is present, which solves the errors

To 1:

It can be an XML-File like this:

<CriticalComponents>
   <Component>
     <Name>Intel GMA950</Name>
     <Description>Intel Graphiccard</Description>
     <TestCommand>/usr/sbin/lspci | grep -i 950</TestCommand>
    <ErrorMsg>
      <EN>Graphical Desktop isn't working after uodate</EN>
    </ErrorMsg>
  </Component>
</CriticalComponents>

A structure like this allows to display a detailed report (if needed in 
several languages) and allows to test for nearly every hardware with help of 
TestCommand. In the case above, all TestCommand should return nothing, of the 
component is not present. So the testing mechanism is quite flexible and for 
most cases a simple call with a pipe to grep is enough to find a component. 
Another reason is, such a system would be quite easily to code and mantained.

So I'm happy if this thougts starts a discussion about such a mechanism and 
results in any implementation of such a thing. I'm also interested if such a 
mechanism before updating is interesting for ubuntu users or not, from my 
state it is a needed feature to address people without computer knowledge!

Yours' sincerly,

Joachim Langenbach
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20100525/06bf94c3/attachment.sig>