Re: thunderbird upgrade - wtf?

[Rich Mattes <richmattes gmail com>]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:

On 10/11/2009 10:24 PM, Michael Cronenworth wrote:

  

Did I say that people should do exactly as I do? No. Please don't put
words in my mouth.
    

It did clearly appear that you implied that. To simplify matters, the
basic question really is whether it is ok for updates to cause problems
for end users. I would argue that it is not

  

True, I read this as "users should know thunderbird is apt to change at any second so they should be keeping track of thunderbird".  It is unreasonable to expect all users to be aware of Thunderbird's volatile state, especially when every past update has done little to change the overall feel of the program (minus the ugly new icons).  Not everyone using a Fedora desktop is keeping track of what's going on in the development community.  They just want to sit down at their computer and get their work done.  These kinds of people sat at their computer one day, saw the PackageKit icon, and (maybe blindly) clicked Update.  Then they were greeted by Thunderbird taking the liberty of re-arranging their entire folder hierarchy and hammering the hard drive for quite some time, making the computer totally unusable while the user is trying to figure out what the heck is going on.  It's a very alarming experience when all you want is your inbox.  I know it took me quite a while to figure out where my mail went, and why my inbox subfolders were nowhere near my inboxes anymore.  At the very least, Smart Folders should not have been made the default view.  The indexing is also much too aggressive (especially on my poor 5 year old laptop), but I'm not sure how much the Fedora packagers can tweak that feature.

Then were was your negative karma? I run TB on 3 different machines
(different platforms/arches) and have not encountered any "disastrous"
side effects so my positive karma does not accurately reflect all
possible scenarios.
    

If maintainers choose to include a beta release, then it would have been
better to collect more feedback for a longer period of time for updates.
 My mails to this list is my "negative karma". Other users have
confirmed that there are problems as well. Let's address that issue now
instead of pretending that there is no problem.

Rahul

  

Yes, the fact that an email with subject "thunderbird upgrade - wtf?" has already reached 20 or so replies in 12 hours could be construed as a sign of "negative karma."

Rich