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

[Aigars Mahinovs]

2009/2/23 Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>:
> 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.

This should be an important concern. It should be simple to write a
very small C program that would start up, look at the system load
running applications and available RAM and then only start a secondary
application (such as an automatic update) when some conditions are
met, for example system load <0.5 over last 15 minutes, 200Mb of free
RAM (including cache RAM at 2:1 ratio). Then automatic security
updates could be done in the background (if user so chooses) and also
a button could be added to the update-manager to "Upgrade when idle".

It would also be perfectly fine for the update system to periodically
notify the user that "23 updates are available" and escalate the
notification to a persistent one for "3 security updates and 24 other
updates are available" asking the user to launch the Update Manager.

However, the system should _never_ open windows without user action.
Linux is about user being in control. Viruses on Windows take away
control from users by creating new pop-up (and pop-under) windows. Any
new Ubuntu user coming from virus infected waters will automatically
associate a window that magically appears on his desktop as a virus,
many veteran Linux user will see that as a violation of user trust in
the system. The system can poke user via notification or maybe even
icons in really important cases, but window control is user's domain
and the system has no business messing with that.

-- 
Best regards,
    Aigars Mahinovs        mailto:aigarius at debian.org
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