update-manager behaviour [was: Auto-launching of applications]

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 05:57:19PM +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Mario Limonciello wrote on 20/02/09 17:09:
> > I can think of cases when this behavior can be really disruptive too.
> > 
> > Think about how annoying it would be if update manager was launching
> > while:
> > 
> >     * Watching a movie
> >     * Playing a full screen game
> >     * Any time spent in MythTV or boxee
> >...
> 
> Whenever Update Manager opens automatically, it should open in the
> background. Please report bugs about specific cases where this doesn't
> happen, including what window manager you're using.

This question assumes that opening unfocused in the background is
sufficient to cause it not to interfere with running applications. This
is not an obviously correct assumption. A 100MB footprint with
non-trivial extra I/O out of the blue (not in response to an explicit
user action) is more than enough to interfere with other things you're
doing regardless of focus, particularly the performance-critical things
given as examples above.

It would be lovely if we could accurately annotate processes with tools
like nice and ionice such that this wasn't a problem, but IME this is
not a terribly exact science as yet, particularly not when you push a
memory-limited system into swap thrashing. Desktop UI design cannot
exist in an idealised vacuum; it needs to consider factors such as this.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]