On 11 May 2009, at 11:32, Darren Kenny wrote: > Hi John, > > On 08/05/2009 21:17, John Leser wrote: >> >> Having outlined the concerns with the current method, the solution we >> are now considering for upgrades is: >> >> 1. At upgrade time, migrate existing NWAM state into the User NCP. >> 2. Always activate the Automatic NCP after an upgrade. > > I think that this makes sense, although I do think that some logic > could tell if > the upgrade is different - mainly by generating a new User NCP, and > comparing it > to the Automatic NCP - if they are the same use the Automatic NCP.
Either way (and this is more of a note-to-self), we might need a minor tweak to the online help here... IIRC it currently specifies that the User NCP will initially be a copy of the Automatic NCP, which isn't necessarily going to be the case after an upgrade. > The main concern I would have is that we are telling people things > that they may > simply not care about - and we'd likely have to do this for all > users of a > system, that's why I would prefer we at least try to ascertain if > the switch is > really necessary. > > Calum, and ideas here? Hmm. As always, we certainly want to minimise the amount of stuff we pop up in users' faces. However hard we try, most people aren't going to read it, let alone remember it later. First off, from a user's perspective, I have to say I'm not immediately convinced by the reasons for forcing me to the Automatic NCP after upgrading. If my seamless upgrade experience is best served by switching me to the User NCP so that my network functions the same as it did before I upgraded, then as a user, that's what I'd want to happen. I certainly wouldn't care that it makes my configuration non-default, or different from my co-worker down the hall who did a fresh install. I only expect default behaviour if I've done a fresh install, otherwise I expect as much of my previous environment to be migrated as possible. Users' number one concern when upgrading anything is that Everything Still Works. (If we went that route, I guess we could still pop up a message on first login after upgrade if we really wanted to, that said something along the lines of "for future reference, we've switched you over to the User profile so that everything still works... but if you have problems, you might like to try the Automatic profile instead". But in practice there's usually little point telling people about something they might want/have to do at some point in the future, because they'll just forget what it was they had to do or how to do it anyway.) If we're stuck on the forced-Automatic route, maybe it would be feasible, only on the first login after upgrade, to wait and see if the Automatic NCP results in any connection being established, and if not, switch over to the User NCP instead? (And if that results in a connection, *maybe* display some sort of message saying what just happened; if it doesn't, just switch back to Automatic and report the lack of connectivity in the usual way?) Not suggesting that would be foolproof, but it would at least give Automatic a fair crack of the whip before falling back to the user's previous configuration if that was the only thing that worked... Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:calum.benson at sun.com OpenSolaris Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
