[olpc-software] Use cases and design scenarios for software handling

[Mike Hearn]

On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 13:03 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> They won't I suspect go away. Since succeeding isnt possible, failing must be
> possible but it has to be in a user understandable fashion

Right. I think the only error it makes sense to present the user with is
"your laptop is too old". That's easy to understand, and what many
errors users get today from rpm/apt actually mean anyway.

> 	Student A spends all night playing an educational game (say nethack)
> and gets to a really deep level, then goes to bed. In the morning school 
> requires a new program but there is no room. Student A will want to keep the
> other bits but not the program so that they can reinstall nethack later.

Thomas Leonard has often made the excellent point that space taken up by
this type of user data is really low, so it makes sense to just never
delete it. Half a gig is still half a gig, and user generated data
should not take up much space. It's best to treat save games and user
preferences as regular (visible) documents in $HOME, probably.

> Agreed - the Sun J2ME devkit and the Nokia phone devkit do this for the 
> phone java packages and it just works.

Yeah, I've done some J2ME development. It was very easy to get to grips
with. There's a lot we can learn from this in general (mistakes as well
as good points).

thanks -mike