xfce-cpufreq plugin and upgrades

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, October 23, 2012 6:04 am, kaj.ailomaa at mousike.me wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012, at 11:44 AM, Janne Jokitalo wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 05:00:21PM +0800, Ho Wan Chan wrote:
> <snip>
>> > >
>> > Er the two metas are the photography and publishing metas. Since
>> > 12.04->12.10 upgrades don't include these metas, we hope to at least
>> be
>> > able to provide this when 14.04 LTS releases.

>> Yes, and that is my reasoning exactly. When precise didn't have these
>> metas,
>> what difference does it make for LTS-to-LTS upgrade, to have them in
>> quantal?
>>
>
> I believe the reasoning is that when upgrading to Quantal, one would get
> all new additions, just as you would by doing a fresh install.
>
> But, I think we should talk more about what we are expecting from an
> upgrade. Since user files are not changed (and what else?), I don't know
> if we can expect an upgrade to be similar or the same as a fresh
> installation.
> I haven't looked at how Ubuntu views upgrades. Would probably be good to
> decide what an upgrade cannot do for us, and from there, what we would
> like it to do for Ubuntu Studio.

An upgrade takes all the software on the machine and changes it over to
the same SW in the new version. this includes any new versions of the
metas. So whatever software is already installed seems to get updated,
including any the user installed after the original install. It does not
look at the seeds or add metas not already included. It also doesn't
uninstall SW the old metas may have installed that those metas no longer
include. So for example, 12.04 had the xfcetask-manager and 12.10 has the
gnome-system-monitor instead. An upgrade has both.

If the user has not changed their menu at all. Then the upgrade will have
a new menu. If they have used alacarte to change the menu, their changes
will be superimposed on top of the new menu which may or may not make
sense.

Panels... fun stuff here. I do not know the whole story on this :) but
assuming the same panel software, the panel will remain as before the
upgrade because at first login the system panel config is imported to the
users home directory. The upgrade from xfce4.8 to 4.10 seemed to deal with
any changes there should have been to these files to make them work with
the new version. (there were some because we had to change our config to
make it work)

So any changes we make to the panel from one cycle to the next will not
show up on the users panel with an upgrade. While we could force the
import of the new config, I am not sure we should. I think the user who
upgrades wants their desktop to remain pretty much the way it is.

When we had the alt ISO the user could choose to install only some of the
metas (they might choose not to install video and graphics for example)
and in that case would expect only the metas they had installed to be
upgraded. However if one of those metas changed they would expect those
changes to show up. From this POV we should add the photography meta and
not the publishing meta because 12.04 had that. Adding both would give as
close as possible the experience the live ISO provides.

I think, given the size of todays hard drives, the installed size is not
really an issue. The menu breaks everything up nicely and so a user can
ignore the workflows they are not interested in. At this point providing a
consistent product that doesn't confuse the user with missing parts may
make more sense.

In the end... the fresh install is always going to be the preferred
upgrade route. The best tested and thought out. Those who upgrade should
expect some differences. A production machine should probably not be
upgraded at all, but rather have a new drive added with the new version on
that so that any project started on the old system can be completed or
accessed as it was. If all projects can be imported to the new drive
without problems then the old drive would be free for other uses.

Just my thoughts.


-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net