Comment 400 for bug 332945

-----Original Message-----
From: Vincenzo Ciancia
Subject: Re: [Bug 332945] Re: [Jaunty] Update Notifier icon would
provide useful status information
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 09:59:50 -0000

>I am in all ways against automatic updates because I think the user must
>be aware of when something delicate is happening. E.g. in the last week
>before submitting a thesis, if the system is upgraded and for some
>reason broken, you sure that I will come and kill some of you :) You are
>all lukcy that I am not supposed to submit any more theses.

I can see your point; however, this can happen even to those who
manually approve each and every update. It happened to me a couple of
months ago where I approved a kernel update, and the update crashed X
and kept it from being able to start. Granted, I was subscribed to
Proposed updates and so expected that sort of thing to happen, but it
can still happen to anyone whether the update was automated or not. At
least with manual updates, if something goes wrong, you've got a better
idea where to look for the cause.

At any rate, I don't think it's really going to be a big issue, if only
the security updates are automated. I've had automatic updates enabled
on my file server for more than a year, and it hasn't crashed yet - and
before you say, "well, yes, but that's a server," I do have gdm and
ubuntu-desktop packages installed.

>No, we should not do something potentially harmful by default. What if
>an user does not know this and finds a 6000 euros internet bill at the
>end of the month? Sure that'll be experience but I don't think they will
>use linux anymore. Anything that may make automatic connections should
>require user authorization. How to make this seamless is a possible
>space for decision.

The same could be said for Windows. Since Windows XP SP2, automatic
security updates are turned on by default, and users have to
specifically opt out of it to turn it off. Someone transitioning from a
recent version of Windows should be used to that behavior.

Perhaps, instead of automatically enabling automatic updates, it can be
one of the questions asked during Ubuntu installation.