Distro upgrade warning should be more useful
Currently…
when you update your distro (in my case from Fedora 28 to 29) you get a list of packages that are not compatible.
What's wrong with that
It is not actionable. You get a list and are left out in the dark about what to do now.
Use case
Actually, consider the use case behind it: What we want is the user to be aware of that and check if it is okay for them to remove these packages. If it is, they should continue. If not, cancel it for now and possibly look for alternatives or so.
Proposal
That's why I have several ideas… The first thing I always have to do when I see this is look for more information. This includes the questions (we should answer):
- What is this package even about? (in most cases, I have not heard the name as it is some low-level stuff)
- Does anything of my software depend on it?
- Can I remove it safely? Are there alternatives?
The last thing is hard to solve technically, but a few ideas are:
- show the description (on click, as usual for package update lists or so)
- link to the web repository of the distro (i.e. https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/ here) with a button or so
- make the user aware that no other package depends on this (yes, I really always do a
rpm -q --whatrequires
to be sure…) or e.g. list the dependency tree in some kind of way or only list top-level packages that the user knows or so - possibly have a way for distro maintainers to provide a "changelog-like" note for known common packages that are not compatible anymore; there they could provide alternatives