On Saturday 11 February 2006 12:08, John Perry wrote:
Ken Schneider wrote:
On Sat, 2006-02-11 at 13:52 +0100, Jos van Kan wrote:
No they are not security updates. Most of them are localization files (for OO 1 for crying out loud) and I agree with Allen that it would be nice to be able to say "No I'm not downloading those files, not now, not ever, never". And whether they are crap or not is all in the eye of the beholder.
I believe that the people that volunteer their time to write these programs would highly disagree with you calling them crap.
OK, so I've maybe used inappropriate terms to emphasize the frustration that the huge mass of (to me) useless information engenders. To anyone who feels I have offended them, I apologize.
But I will also agree that displaying patches/updates that do not apply to what I have installed should have a means of being hidden from view just as installed patches/updates are. Provide an option in the pulldown to should patches/updates for packages -not- installed.
Which is all any of us have asked for. If it's easy to do, it should be done soon. If it's hard, say so. But it should be addressed. Decades of research in human factors design have shown that too much information, especially inappropriate information, can be worse than too little. We should not have to wade through piles of localization tweaks to find important security updates. As I mentioned before, the apparent tendency to have really new stuff at the beginning relieves to a substantial degree the problem, but does not altogether eliminate it.
Actually, I'd like to see a firm statement from someone who really knows that new updates will always be at the beginning. Someone who is involved in, or associated with, the YOU designers at suse. That would make me feel much better about ignoring the long list of, uh, "information I don't need and can't use" :-).
I guess if this issue is the only thing customers have on their mind, then the SuSE distro is in pretty good shape. :-)