System settings version information lacks indication of writeable image

[John McAleely]

Bq Aquaris E4.5 / Ubuntu 15.04 (r24)

When reporting incidents and problems, users commonly include the version information presented in system settings.

It is becoming clear that the first piece of additional information sought by responders is whether the image is (or has been) writable , and therefore in a potentially untested state.

System Settings should include an annotation in its reported version strings to indicate that the image is writable.

This should be designed at the same time as bug 1385339 and bug 1334257.

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

I think it would be desireable if the annotation were persistent until a system reset is performed - so if your filesystem is ever writable, the flag is remembered.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The design needs to be updated to accomodate that

[Jonas G. Drange (jonas-drange)]

How does System Settings know if the image is writable or not?

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

I am not sure it can, I simply remount the file system, and after reboot its back to ro. Unless there is some signal somewhere to catch but I doubt it

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

I assume some sort of 'best effort' is worth it here. So, when system settings opens, see if the / filesystem is mounted writeable.

If so, set a flag, and remember it forever (well, until the handset is factory reset, or flashed with u-d-f --bootstrap)

This won't catch all cases, but it will catch many.

Additionally, the phablet-tools scripts which are the 'official' means of marking writeable could collaborate and also set this flag.

Note that if a user can reset this flag by hand in the terminal, that's fine. The intention is to assist communication with users who don't fully understand the consequences/