Humanized changelog and news after a dist-upgrade

[Carlos F.]

Hi, i'm an Ubuntu user and noticed that you are working on a new upgrade
(dist-upgrade) meaning that automates the upgrading to a new release. I
had some idea that you might find useful, so here it is.

On windows systems, after installing/updating, when the system is
booting a window appears, showing the release notes, new improvements,
etc. I think that would be useful for Ubuntu because it follows Gnome
releases, and after every new release there are some interesting news.

For example, Gnome 2.12 has little changes and improvements over 2.10,
Breezy will have more system tools and programs than Hoary, etc. So why
not show a little window with two or three buttons, allowing the user to
read a simple page (HTML or something, like Davyd's
http://www.gnome.org/%7Edavyd/gnome-2-12/) to see what they can do now
that couldn't before. Something like a humanized changelog.

[Michael replied: We are working in this direction by having a new feature called
UpgradeHooks [1] in place. Applications can put little notes on when they
are installed and show text and (optional) a script. This could be
used to show a complex changelog as well by just starting firefox and
showing the notes.]

[Corey Burger (corey.burger)]

The best tool for this would be the new Quickguide the doc team is doing. It is
basically in the style of Davyd's stuff.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

The dist-upgrade tool was postponed for breezy+1. Then I'll see what can be done
about your idea.

Cheers,
 Michael

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

We cannot include a browser widget to show html pages in the dist-upgrade tool.

But we could include a link to a highlights tour in the release notes. The release notes viewer supports links.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuickTourDraft seems to be dead?

[Stephan (stephan-h)]

I've been wondering when updates for individual packages are offered,
how to find out about the changes, notably: are changes of category
security fix, bug fix, added features etc.

This is relevant if pending updates require large downloads,
and the user wants to reduce downloading to the most urgent updates.

Would this be a separate wish (as it is about much more fine-grained
changelogs than the original post)?

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

This is already the case for update-manager. the updates are grouped by their origin. Furthermore this bug is not about the normal update-manager interface but the dist-upgrade part.