UpdateNotifierNotAdmin

Revision 3 as of 2008-08-06 16:15:35

Clear message

Summary

Update Notifier is currently of little use to non-administrator users. In fact, it is not run when the user is not in the administrators group. A mode specifically set by an administrator should exist so that the notification daemon can inform the user of update notes and prompt for reboots when needed.

Rationale

Even though an administrator has a non-interactive or centralized update system of some sort, users still need to be notified of kernel updates or to restart their firefox instance. Notifications and reminders are very useful to ensure end-user compliance of machine rebooting. Without the notification daemon taking on these roles for non-administrator users a seperate application would need to be written or adapted from the notification daemon and keep up to date on the semantics of the notifications information in /var/lib/update-notifier/ . A specifc mode for this (perhaps even non-default) is to avoid the clutter of desktops that were originally intended to be simple, perhaps originally configured as Kiosk-style or for children. It also should not prompt for reboots on edbuntu terminal servers by default.

Use cases

Joe the administrator keeps packages up to date using custom scripts or the upcoming nwu utility. He needs a method to remind users to reboot the machines after a critical kernel upgrade.

Brian configures his Mother's machine so she does not have administrator access. She still needs to know about update notes such as the "restart Firefox" note.

Scope

Update-manager will need code updates. It is not assumed that other packages will need changes.

Design

In theory a mode that only shows notes and reboot requests but does not show the updates available button is all that is required. I've not yet investigated the Update Notifier codebase.

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec