brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Marc Deslauriers]

On Tue, 2010-10-05 at 14:19 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> >
> > On Android Marketplace, the information about updates is displayed
> > prominently and is (I think) very important.  What we currently ship is
> > not the most user friendly information, but in a world where
> > application updates are not mediated by the distribution development
> > process, users will need to be more aware of what's changing in their
> > software, not less.
> 
> Absolutely. I would love it if changelogs were as beautifully presented
> as this, for example:
> <http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/>
> <http://launchpad.net/sparkle>
> 
> That would be two useful things for Ubuntu and Debian developers to
> collaborate on. First, agreeing on a way to write or generate
> human-readable changelog language (for example "This update fixes a
> security problem where an attacker could run unauthorized code",
> separately from the text that says "SECURITY UPDATE: integer overflow in
> strfmon() might lead to arbitrary code execution"). And second, agreeing
> on a lightweight markup language for changelog formatting, so that
> changelogs are still readable by traditional tools, but look nicer when
> presented graphically.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language>
> 

I personally think displaying the packaging changelog to the user is
completely ridiculous. Our USN database already contains a _much_ better
description of security updates to display to the end user: a simple
version for most users, and a slightly more detailed version for
technical users. We need to figure out a way to display _that_ text to
the user, and not the packaging changelog.

Of course, that only takes care of security updates. There would need to
be a way to do the same for SRUs and other package updates also.

Marc.