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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/04/16 15:58, Dirk Hohndel wrote:<br>
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<div>Seriously, we need to very very very clearly separate two
user groups:</div>
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<div>A) people who are comfortable installing debian on some
random device</div>
<div>and making all this work</div>
<div>B) actual divers and users of Subsurface-mobile on their
iPhone with no</div>
<div>discernible knowledge of computers</div>
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<div>On every dive trip I'm on I somehow end up meeting about
zero or one</div>
<div>people in group A and everyone else is in group B. For
group B we should</div>
<div>pick ONE device, ONE solution, ONE way of doing this. Keep
it as simple</div>
<div>as humanly possible.</div>
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Just wanted to throw this in as a suggestion:<br>
<br>
To make upgrades and upgrade-backout as seamless as possible for
group B , how about having the main software as a complete read-only
chroot image provided by the project? You'd have just enough on the
bare metal to select the latest chroot image (or last known working
on failure) and switch to it. That way it could have a one-click (or
possibly no-click) upgrade. You could keep the last 2 or 3 images
for backout purposes. This avoids the situation where devices get
into a state that requires user intervention because one or more
.deb fail to apply properly.<br>
<br>
apt-get could still be used by the project team to make the images,
<br>
<br>
I think of this more like an Android or iPhone upgrade that applies
a complete image rather than a desktop upgrade where you take
individual packages, The difference though is keeping backout images
and automatically failing back in case the new image fails load for
some reason. <br>
<br>
This also has the advantage that someone troubleshooting will be
able to know, for a particular version, exactly what software the
user has on the device without worrying about which packages they
may or may not have picked up along the way.<br>
<br>
The disadvantage is that a full image download is needed for each
upgrade, which provides an intensive to make it as minimal as
possible. Group A users can always side-load their favourite tools
after updating.<br>
<br>
cheers,<br>
<br>
Tim<br>
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