Upgrade management

[Mike Hearn]

[CCd wine-devel as I think you meant it to go there originally]

Holly Bostick wrote:
> Seems to me that whether or not 99% of users will forget is not your 
> responsibility as developers. Other than making very sure that users 
> know there is something to remember, further programming against the 
> possibility that they will forget what you told them not to is more work 
> for you, simply in order to absolve them of responsibility for their own 
> system and make things "look good" at all times to those who want 
> everything "click and run".
> 
> Look at the problems that attitude (and the compensatory measures to 
> resolve it) has caused Microsoft. I would think that you all have better 
> things to do with your valuable development time-- namely developing the 
> actual application, not babysitting me (the user with the mind like a 
> sieve).

Well, there are a couple of good reasons why automatic upgrades are good 
for us developers:

1) If we don't, we'll just get bug reports due to people not having full
    upgrades: we already get plenty of bizarre bug reports due to broken
    packaging, last thing we need is for people to fill bugzilla with
    even more. And yes some developers do tech support :)

2) We already do a ton of stuff automatically, and nobody ever
    notices. This strongly implies that automatic setup and configuration
    does benefit people: I can assure you they noticed when we didn't
    set up the wine config upstream! We want Wine to have a good
    reputation for reliability, but currently it doesn't - people run
    random Foo app, it crashes and burns maybe due to incorrect
    configuration and they walk away saying "Oh well, Wine is crap,
    what did I expect?". This happens quite a bit. Ensuring the user
    is cleanly and transparently upgraded makes things Just Work to
    a greater extent, which is good for everybody.

I'm still not hugely convinced about the backup thing: if you want to 
back up your configuration before upgrading Wine it's very easy:

    cp -rv ~/.wine ~/.wine.old

... we could even do that as part of the upgrade process.

Possibly we should back up the registry, but not the virtual drive C. 
The C drive is going to change a lot less than the registry will: a Wine 
upgrade typically means new DLLs and maybe new registry contents. It 
rarely means changes to the drive layout.

thanks -mike