Comment 148 for bug 207072

canonical is paying people to work on ubuntu but is not taking the decision for the project though so there is no reason canonical should be giving some explanation about the choice, anyway some context:

- upstream decided to push gvfs in GNOME 2.22 after the stable of the 2.21 cycle, by the time that was clear hardy unstable already had a GNOME 2.21 version
- gnomevfs is known to have issues too, to be buggy and is not maintained upstream, better to support for years a clean codebase which is maintained upstream and by other distribution
- not using gnomevfs would have meant downgrading to GNOME 2.20 which is something not easy to do, which would have brought lot of other issues back, which is not easy to do technically and which would have mean ubuntu couldn't count on upstream work since GNOME only work on his current version
- lot of ubuntu users expect the current GNOME to be available in ubuntu, intrepid would still be stucked to the gutsy version if the upgrade was blocked on gvfs-smb working for everybody
- nobody signaled an issue in gvfs-smb during most of the unstable cycle and the issue is limited to some configurations

the issue might be annoying but the way forward is rather to get gvfs fixed than to hold GNOME to a one year old version ignoring hundred of bug fixes and improvement only for the benefit of some samba users