Dan Price wrote:
> On Mon 28 Jul 2008 at 12:06PM, Dave Miner wrote:
>> However, I agree that we are likely to continue to run into flag-day 
>> issues occasionally, and it would be nice to have a way to notify users 
>> of them more directly.  I'm not sure the generic "review the notes" 
>> message is going to do it, though.
> 
> Can we agree that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good
> here?  Telling people to review *something* is better than doing
> nothing, then waiting for a mechanism that (as Shawn pointed out) we
> don't really have.
> 

I would never advocate perfection over goodness, but I think there's 
legitimate room to question whether this is in fact going to accomplish 
goodness.  For the few people it might save (nobody, if we manage to 
avoid flag days), you're subjecting everyone to a non-alert, like 
"Buckle up".  After the first couple of updates that don't have any 
nasty warnings or results, users learn to auto-pilot through these sorts 
of prompts, so the very few you might end up saving comes at some 
convenience cost to everyone else.  Those costs are always difficult to 
quantify, of course, but the general user experience degradation is 
something I advise being very careful about.

If we do decide to go ahead with your proposal, I would recommend two 
things:

-  replace the URL with a much shorter one (http://opensolaris.com/notes 
or somesuch; it can of course be a redirect to the existing URL) so that 
those who do decide to eat their peas get to type a lot less.
- prompt should be a simple y/n, default to n; eliminate the q choice.

Dave
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