Lack of update information

Mark McLoughlin markmc at redhat.com
Thu Jan 29 10:08:04 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 10:38 +0100, Denis Leroy wrote:
> ...
> > a bug in the printer signal
> > proxy which could cause application crashes (the printer object was being
> > unreferenced at an inappropriate place),
...

> Good job :-) But this whole exercise is futile. We DO ALREADY ship both 
> the ChangeLog and the NEWS files in the documentation directory, either 
> with the library or development package. How is repeating or summarizing 
> these internal changes *on Bodhi* useful to anyone ?

Kevin's summary does something the NEWS file does not - it calls out a
particular crasher bug that could affect user applications. IMHO, that
is the only truly compelling reason a user has to apply this update and
it is the most user relevant part of Kevin's description.

> As a Fedora user, how is that information going to affect your 
> decision making ? Are you going to decline a package update if the 
> summary doesn't include some key words ? (I call BS on anyone
> answering yes to that).

It's a fair point that not many users would decline the update just
because it doesn't fix a bug which affects them. It's not so much about
decision making, it's about having some explanation as to why the update
is important.

If PackageKit pops up tells you there are 50 updates pending, it's much
nicer if you can scan through the descriptions and come away with the
conclusion that "oh, there's a bunch of important fixes in there" rather
than "this is just a bunch of gratuitous updates, but if I don't apply
them all I might miss something important".

Cheers,
Mark.




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