Building Safety Into Our Work

[Evan Huus]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Anthony Papillion <papillion at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Jono Bacon <jono at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> Today on the #ubuntu-power-users channel LaserJock raised a really
>> important point: if we have essentially two broad sets of users
>> (end-users who rely on the out-of-the-box desktop experience, and power
>> users who want to trick out their systems), how do we protect end-users
>> from damaging their system by using tools designed for power users?
>
> Hi Jono,
>
> Definitely a very important topic as even experienced users can mess things
> up from time to time. I'm going to publicly support the idea I brought up in
> the channel about backup and rollback. I think that would probably be the
> easiest route to ensure that changes were reversible. Sort of like the way
> certain tools (like registry cleaners) on Windows will back up your registry
> prior to making changes. That way, you're never left with a non-bootable
> system. At worst, you have to log in
>
> Anthony

This is definitely an key topic, so it's worth pointing out that
Ubuntu Tweak is already fairly good about this. I don't have it in
front of me, so I can't quote specific options, but I know it does
have two useful features in this regard:

1) PPA Removal: this feature removes the PPA from your sources and
safely downgrades all affected packages, doing some clever stuff to
handle the weird dependency problems that can come from doing this
manually.

2) Gconf backup/restore: exactly as the windows registry option that
you mentioned, Anthony.

Both features could probably be more prominent, but they do exist already.

Evan