On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 8:19 AM Patrick Boutilier
<boutilpj(a)ednet.ns.ca> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/9/21 9:08 AM, Patrick Boutilier wrote:
>> On 5/6/21 4:06 PM, Tomáš Trnka wrote:
>>> Hello everyone,
>>>
>>> After updating to F34, I was unpleasantly surprised by the new Plasma
>>> update
>>> notifier (plasma-discover-notifier). Even though the previous
>>> plasma-pk-updates
>>> thing had its quirks and Apper also wasn't the most featureful of
package
>>> managers, I still ran into a handful of issues with Discover that make it
>>> pretty much useless for me:
>>>
>>> – There seems to be no way to select which updates to install. All I
>>> can see
>>> is a list of available updates with a button to install all of them,
>>> but no
>>> way to pick and choose a subset. (Yes, I could use commandline DNF with a
>>> whole bunch of "-x" arguments to get the job done, but the point of
a
>>> GUI is
>>> to make things more user friendly, isn't it?)
>>> – I can't seem to find the description of individual package updates
>>> (the short
>>> changelog that plasma-pk-updates shows when you click a particular
>>> package,
>>> together with Bugzilla or Bodhi links). Again, getting these any other
>>> way
>>> than through the GUI updater is a real hassle.
>>> – The tray notifier doesn't let me actually do anything directly, I
>>> have to
>>> wait for it to open a full Discover window and spend a long while
>>> loading the
>>> updates, which is much more disruptive than the few seconds needed to
>>> trigger
>>> updating through plasma-pk-updates.
>>>
>>
>> Even worse is that every single update requires a reboot. I just took a
>> fully updated system and then downgraded vlc. Updated with Discover and
>> even though it only had to update vlc-core-3.0.13-1.fc34.x86_64 and
>> vlc-3.0.13-1.fc34.x86_64 it still required a reboot.
>>
>
> Looks like this will be an option in 5.22 .
>
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/111
>
> Although I am not sure how doing an online vlc update will cause an
> "unstable system". It wouldn't be so bad if there were not almost
daily
> updates available.
>
We don't have a heuristic for differentiating what a "safe update" and
an "unsafe update" would be. In the VLC case, it would be "safe" as
long as the phonon-vlc backend was not used for KDE Plasma (we don't
use it by default, but someone could swap it in from a third-party
build).
It can get fairly complicated, and it's always been a bad idea to
update the desktop software while it's running from within the
terminal of the said desktop, because you can lead to a scenario where
you've temporarily caused a broken state that would only be fixed by
rebooting anyway. For the majority of users, offline updates for
packages is the correct behavior.
That said, yes, Plasma 5.22 (coming in a month) will introduce a
user-accessible option to turn it off.
Is there any way for the packages themselves to "request" offline
updates? I agree that updating plasma, kf5-*, etc.. live is not a good
idea. But something like nano for instance shouldn't need to be updated
offline.