"Strategic updates"

[thebrix]

I am very impressed by Celena, and support the update policy - what Ubuntu does is, in its way, worse than with Windows as all sorts of stuff "comes down the wire" and there is often no indication of how important the update is or even a decent description of what it is supposed to do!

However ... tying in with the proposed replacement of Ubuntu's update code, I believe there should be a Mint policy of "strategic updates" because some applications have worthwhile security updates/bug fixes, are not core to the operation of the machine (for example, if Pidgin misbehaves the machine will not be made unbootable) and, often, are not updated by Ubuntu ... yet are very obvious if they are out of date because they appear on the desktop and are used every day.

This is already happening with Firefox, and I suggest it is extended to the applications which "everyone uses" viz.

Thunderbird
Pidgin
GIMP
OpenOffice.org
Sunbird
Amarok
envy (possibly)

(any others?)

These "strategic updates" are already done by Mepis, and are a great success - v2.3.0 of OOo, which has been tested to death (multiple betas and Release Clients) and has improvements worth having, is already available from the Mepis repositories whereas those using Feisty, or using a distribution based on Feisty, will have v2.2.0 "for ever" unless they scrape up an unofficial build from somewhere.

(As I have done for Thunderbird - that in Feisty is 1.5.0.10, the current 1.5 version is 1.5.0.12, the 2.0 version available from the software portal is 2.0.0.0, and the current 2.0 version is 2.0.0.6).

Of course, if the user declines the "strategic update" they can carry on with the old version.

[Husse]

http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/