On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 5:20 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, 2017-04-06 at 16:45 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
Maybe a wifi connection login dialog needs a checkbox to indicate whether it's a metered connection. Because however it's supposed to work, isn't reliable in the real world.
Yeah, this is basically my conclusion. I strongly doubt it'll ever be possible to achieve an acceptable level of magic detection here. Even connections that aren't *tethered* could certainly have data transfer caps for one reason or another. Just assuming you can go ahead and download as many GB of updates as you like without any kind of prior warning or even notification while the download is ongoing is a really bad idea.
Yeah I don't have a great solution for this other than literally bugging the user and asking at each initial connection. Maybe it's plausible to not do this for wired connections? I'll get crotchety if I plug in a wired connection but don't get a network and internet connection straight away. But then I also get crotchety when, upon a clean installation, Fedora sucks down a gig worth of updates in the first 5-10 minutes (Windows and macOS do not do this, they ask). But at a certain point down the road, I do want such updates and to not be bothered.
So the only thing I can think of is actively notifying the user of the current behavior and inviting them to change it, rather than it just being passive and murky. So maybe something in g-i-s for the initial inform and consent? And then a checkbox in wireless connect dialogs?