Package Management Blows Goats (use cases)

[Paul Nasrat]

On Tue, 2007-07-31 at 09:51 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> (from my blog, apologies to anyone that's read this once already)

Have you read - http://klik.atekon.de/presentation/klik.html it's
focussed on the users care about applications and highlights some of the
issues with existing pkg/distro universe setup.

> Before ideal system requirements we should talk about use cases and
> system interactions. 

OK who do we care about - your subject implies all package management,
you don't really cover large systems deployment, your examples are
direct user not centrally administered based.

> I think this is where update systems have gone
> wrong in the past, closely integrating with the existing package
> system
> rather than studying the complete ideal user interactions.

So who are your users based on your cases I'm guessing:

Suzanne - non administrator casual user
Simon - a more advanced user sharing a machine with Suzanne
Toby - a single user/admin

However this is really not distinct and clear - please expand.

> Boot Time Security Update
> 
> Toby logs into his desktop. A notification area icon with a critical
> icon appears in the top right and a libnotify popup tells him there are
> 3 three critical security updates. The libnotify popup has three
> buttons:
> • Update now in the background
> • Always do updates automatically
> • Ignore for now
> Toby clicks the first button and the update completes in the background.
> When completed, after a few minutes, another libnotify popup appears
> telling Toby that the update was completed and after a few seconds the
> status icon disappears.

This seems a reasonable one not sure if it's boot time or "scheduled
check".

Update automatically - you need to be able to not do this if you're
using GPRS or some low bandwidth connectivity on the road. Maybe we need
a traveller case.

> Downloading an Unknown Application
> 
> Suzanne wants to open a word file. She opens the software finder tool
> and types "office file" into the search box. A list of software appears,
> with OpenOffice being the top entry. She clicks the OpenOffice entry to
> highlight it, and clicks "Install now". Suzanne is not an administrator,
> but because she is locally logged in and the package is from the "fedora
> GPG signed repository" the root password is not required. A notification
> area icon appears with a downloading icon and the package manager is
> closed. When OpenOffice is installed, a libnotify popup tells Suzanne
> that the software has been downloaded and is now ready to use.

The search requires much better metadata than we probably have in
description/summary right now. Can we use mime/file(1) info to help the
search. 

How do we define trust, how do users add trusted sources - or can only
administrators do that.


> Installing new features
> 
> Suzanne switches back to her session and wants to add some clipart to
> the word file she has just opened. She clicks "Insert" and then
> "Clipart" and then a windows pops up telling her that clipart is not
> installed. She clicks "Install" and a progress bar appears and moves
> across as the clipart is downloaded and then installs. When finished,
> the dialog disappears and she chooses a picture of a cat.

Trying out a new version in parallel:

Simon wants to test with the new beta version of pidgin - although he
knows jabber support is broken, Suzanne uses pidgin with jabber to talk
to her friends daily. Simon downloads  the beta package installs, he
uses the beta version, whilst the stable version is still available to
Suzanne.

Paul