update-manager prevents users from seeing&recording errors

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Binary package hint: update-manager

I'm right now updating to Hardy alpha (yeah, I know what I'm doing), and I noticed something annoying about the update process.

To do a distribution update, one has to use "update-manager -d", which starts a custom update dialog. One of this program's features is that the output for each update step is redirected inside a scrolling terminal-like widget, with a rather small history (about three-four screens' worth).

This means that any errors or warnings during the update process are quickly lost, and can't be noticed unless the user actually watches all the output for the half-hour or so of the update, and can read quickly. You can copy and paste it to a text editor, but sometimes the output scrolls up too fast for that.

There should be a way to either send the output to stdout, or (better) to a file. It would very useful to have that, for diagnosing everything happening during an update.

(By the way, this is true for every update I've done in Ubuntu since Hoary.)