Re: GnuTLS for W32

[chad]

On Jan 5, 2012, at 4:09 PM, Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 00:32, Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> LibreOffice, I mean.
> 
> Steel Bank Common Lisp. InkScape. Wireshark. ActivePerl. Bazaar.
> Dropbox. Apache. MySQL. GIMP...

DropBox updates itself without telling you:

        How do I upgrade to the latest version of the Dropbox application?

        [...] Dropbox will silently update itself in the background.

LibreOffice has automatic updates:

        http://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Online_Update

Bazaar tells you to use your package manager (although not on Windows):

        Use your package manager to upgrade to the latest version.

I stopped looking there.

Most of those are typically (that is, for the typical user/administrator) 
checked and managed by the operating system's package manager, as far as I can 
tell. Sure, people can manage them by hand (I have and still do myself), but 
that's certainly not *typical*.  When I still lived inside of GNU/Linux, I used 
kernel distributions only long enough to configure and build my own, but I 
certainly don't expect that kind of behavior from the typical Windows, Mac OS 
X, or Ubuntu user.  I also don't think it should be the default.  As I 
understand it, you seem to be saying that it should.

To be clear: I'm asking you why you object to an easily-disabled system that 
checks for the existence of updates deemed critical by a human being, and warns 
the user if it finds them. I'm not talking about distributing binaries 
(although there certainly are people who are saying it would be convenient if 
someone did that, too).

*Chad