clarification re easy OpenMoko updating for "average" consumer

[ian douglas]

Ron K. Jeffries wrote:
> As an Ubuntu *user* every now and then I get an alert that
> upgrades are available.

Likewise with other major distros like Fedora -- you get an alert that 
upgrades are available when you login, or come back from an idle state 
overnight (nightly cron job I imagine).

In the case of the Freerunner though, if updates are available, we 
should give the user the option of upgrading everything automagically, 
without ever prompting them, or letting them manually update.

Not saying this is necessarily the way to go because some other mobile 
OS does this, but my Blackjack 2 running Windows Mobile 6 gives me the 
option of manually looking for updates and manually applying them, or 
just letting the phone do things on its own. Of course, *because* it's 
Windows I don't let it do anything automatically...

But from an "end user" perspective, if we want to reach non-techies (or 
as Ron put it, people with IQ's less than 175), should we even prompt 
for a password when the root user doesn't even *have* a password?

Unless we prompt the user upon first boot-up of the phone to enter a 
security passphrase for things like updates, locking the phone from any 
use, locking the phone for international calls, etc.

Just my $0.02.

-id