David Bustos wrote: > I presume you mean that everyone is willing to blindly disable a service > which the packaging system has refused to delete because it's running. > I disagree with that judgement, but I have no evidence. Well besides > myself, I suppose.
From a strict semantic standpoint, a single exception disproves an "everyone" statement. :-) However, I don't think anybody claims that *everyone* will blindly disable the service. I claim that in the vast majority of cases, disabling the service is the right answer (that in removing the package that was the user's intent). I claim that in the majority of cases, if a user is told makes a request and is told "you must do X first", they will blindly do X. I have seen far too many users blindly click "OK" on dialog boxes without reading them to believe otherwise. >> (And not only will they blindly do it, they'll gripe and moan and tell >> their friends how Solaris packaging isn't capable of obeying the simplest >> and most obvious of instructions.) > > I don't think that should be a concern if the packaging system is > sufficiently clear about why it's failing. What, I shouldn't complain that the system is making me do some stupid thing when I TOLD it it what I wanted done, and it was OBVIOUS what needed to be done? Haven't you ever fought with a car that thought that it knew better than you when you should be able to open the door, or unlock the door, or lock the door? Every week or so I swear at my van when it refuses to open the side door because I'm not in Park. This is just like that, only without the physical-safety issue, and with the actions required to achieve your goal being more complex. > Right. A user who is removing a package in order to remove a service > would not be surprised by the packaging system disabling the service. > Is that 100% of cases, though? I doubt it. Sure, it's not 100%. Nothing is ever 100%. The question is whether the small percentage of cases where the user did not understand the relationship between the package and the service outweighs the large percentage of cases where the user *did* understand, and expected the service to shut down as part of the uninstallation of the service. > The case that comes to my > mind is a junior administrator who was handed a list of packages to > remove, without knowing which services they deliver. I'd bet real money that such an administrator would blindly disable whatever services the infrastructure said to disable. Junior staff are precisely the people who are unlikely to deeply analyze the situation, who are likely to say "Well, I was told to remove this package, and it appears that I must disable this service to remove the package, so disable it. After all, I wouldn't have been told to remove the package if we didn't want the service disabled.". > and the benefit -- skipping > a disable command -- seems very small to me. It's not just the command. It's that the STOOPID system can't do what I CLEARLY want it to do.
