Re: On updates

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On 15 January 2018 at 13:01, Joaquim Rocha <jrocha endlessm com> wrote:
> [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Software/Updates#Tentative_Design

So, backing up a bit. Is the issue here that people are:

* Paying for bandwidth per Mb?
* Only have unlimited bandwidth during specific times?
* Happy to pay for bandwidth at peak times to install things, but want
to use idle "free" bandwidth for updates?

It might be useful to work out some personas, as like Matthias I want
thing to just magically work, and for software to stay out of my face,
but for other people that's going to cost them money. I think working
out who are our target users are is a long overdue exercise and would
be useful in trying to make things simpler. In a flatpak world we have
the ability to install things live, but we also have to support the
offline updates of ostree and PackageKit.

The other thing we could do to make things simpler is to stop
filtering the updates list based on what is already downloaded. In the
"paying for bandwidth" case this has the effect that the update()
vfunc takes a lot longer as it has to download data (and we have to
convey that in the UI) but it means we can stop doing flatpak
downloads in refresh(). In the "automatic" case we can just download
and deploy in refresh() when the session is idle, obviously showing
the progress if the user stumbles upon the application in the updates
panel or the details page. This keeps us with one boolean setting,
which would be tied to the toggle in the app-menu.

Richard