[Devel] Application Layout design proposal

[Simon McVittie]

On 23/11/15 12:27, Suma Shanbhog (RBEI/ECF4) wrote:
> Can you explain what is meant by data reset in the point below?

It's our equivalent of the "factory reset" in mobile OSs, for instance
"Settings -> Backup & Reset -> Factory data reset" in Android 5. I was
told this is a requirement I need to consider for this and related designs.

> Can you give me a usecase where data reset is done?

I believe the use case is something like this: I own a car that is based
on Apertis, drive it for a while, and then sell it. Before selling the
car, I want to remove my personal data. After the data reset, the
Apertis environment should be in the same state as if I had taken an
unused car of the same specification, brought it up to date, and not
done anything else.

The same mechanism might be useful for a related use-case: a car rental
company has some cars based on Apertis in their fleet. When each car is
returned after use, they perform a data reset to return the rental car
to a "clean slate" state for the next driver, with all preferences
returned to defaults.

I think these might mean we want most app-bundles to be deleted by the
data-reset (otherwise the new owner could tell a lot about me by
observing the set of installed apps), but we want to be able to flag a
subset of app-bundles that will stay?

In the "sell my car" use-case, we'd want to keep the preinstalled
app-bundles, perhaps any new app-bundles that were installed
automatically by OS updates, and perhaps any app-bundles whose licensing
is linked to the car rather than my store account.

In the "rental car" use-case, the rental company might install a store
app-bundle which adds their return locations as POI, which they'd want
to keep across a reset.

-- 
Simon McVittie
Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/>