Calum Benson wrote: > > On 11 May 2009, at 19:29, John Leser wrote: > >> Calum, I agree all of these concerns are valid. Maybe I / we are >> underestimating the difficulty of educating the user through the UI. >> >> I'd add that the idea of pushing people toward the Automatic NCP is >> also partially motivated by the idea that the default behavior in >> phase 1 is much better (esp. for multiple interfaces are available) so >> less customization should be needed. >> >> My main concern for having people on the User NCP is that choosing >> between the User and Auto NCP is supposed to represent a selection of >> "less" or "more" automatic behavior. We're making this choices on >> behalf of the user for an essentially unrelated reason. If there were >> no distinction between the two NCPs other than one having read-only >> contents, it would be much easier for me to embrace the User NCP for >> migration. If that's the design, "Default" might be a better name >> than "Automatic". But I think right now, there are some difference in >> how new devices are handled that makes the Auto NCP more automatic >> than the User one, in terms of the default activation modes. > > Well, the bottom line IMHO is that if you're going to make decisions for > the user quietly behind the scenes, you pretty much have to get them > right every time to avoid a loss of confidence in the technology. > Especially when you're brave enough to call that technology something > like "Auto-Magic" -- what could be less auto-magic than replacing a > known, working networking configuration with a new, broken one? :) > > In that vein, a third option, I guess, might be a one-time dialog at > first login for all upgrading users... whilst foisting a dialog on all > those people isn't an especially pleasing solution either, it would at > least put them in control of their own destiny. You'd want to do it in > such a way as to encourage most people to pick Automatic, while still > pointing out why they might want to pick Manual... maybe something along > the lines of: > > +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ > | | > | *Network Configuration Upgrade* | > | | > | Choose a network profile: | > | | > | (o) Automatic (recommended): detect and configure | > | network devices automatically | > | | > | ( ) Manual: preserve existing network configuration, for | > | advanced users only | > | | > | This dialog will not be shown again, but you can also switch | > | profiles later in the Administration > Network dialog. | > | | > | [Close] | > +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ > > That said, I'd still like to think we could find some way to tell when > Automatic wasn't going to work, and upgrade them to the User profile > instead in those situations. That's just what the user is going to have > to do themselves anyway, and we're supposed to be making their lives > easier... >
As an update, after some discussion, we decided that behavior of the User and Automatic NCPs will be different WRT to when devices appear/disappear (hotplug or otherwise). For the Automatic NCP, NCUs will be added/removed whenever we detect a change in the system. For the User NCP, NCUs are never added or deleted automatically. Of course, automatic behavior works the same among all interfaces that have NCUs defined. What this means, is that hotplugging of network devices (USB wireless) will not work without user interaction if the User NCP is in active. The User will have to manually create NCUs using the CLI or GUI. (After which, hotplugging that device will continue to work until such point as the user deletes the NCUs). Thus, there is a real downside to selecting the User NCP when the Automatic NCP would have worked. That said, the problem with attempting to preserve user preferences on upgrade is that we cannot reliably detect whether the user has customized their NWAM .5 settings. The contents of the llp file can change due to user customization, but also if new devices were added to the system after the initial install. We need to determined first, if the .5 configuration expresses something meaningfully different from what the 1.0 Automatic behavior would do, and second, whether that's an intentional customization. If the logic for this gets too complex, its likely to fail, and will certainly not be easy to test into correctness. I also question how many people who were unhappy with .5's behavior actually customized their llp file, rather than just switching to network:default. And of that set, how many of them would not be happy with the NWAM 1.0 Automatic NCP behavior. Examples would be helpful here. -John > Cheeri, > Calum. >
