Comment 80 for bug 486154

I'm the original reporter of this bug thread.

I have to say, I'm completely dissatisfied so far. Every proposal has
been to effectively kick this downrange and make it someone else's
problem, and I'm -particularly- unhappy that this is viewed as a
window manager issue! It means the (a) behavior will change for every
different window manager, (b) if I'm not running a window manager,
like I'm in single-user mode or a server, I don't -get- a bell???, and
(c) it seems to imply that a -brand new protocol- must be written and
all the WM's and apps much understand that protocol? What??? It's
not as if just -reverting- the ill-advised changes that broke the bell
literally -years- ago now are getting any developer attention, and now
you propose that someone actually has to write something -new- to get
this fixed? How likely, exactly, is this likely to happen, given that
this issue has now been open for about 18 months now---three entire
release cycles, and obviously not going to be fixed for Natty, so that
means 4 cycles, minimum, or two years.

Kicking it to a WM also has a vey bad precedent---I reported a similar
"this just needs to be reverted" ONE-LINE reversion about libwnck
literally -6 years- ago and which, after -2 years-, the developer
actually agreed -should- be reverted---and then it has sat, for -4
more years-, unreverted. So I can't say that anything whose resolution
is "get the metacity developers to revert this" fills me with glee---my
experience so far is that even things they agree about take literally
years to see any action. (I'm talking about
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171804 here.)
(Surprisingly, about a month ago, it suddenly had some activity on the
bug thread. Maybe it'll get fixed. Maybe. From my outsider's
perspective, just looking at that bug thread, it looks like what had
to happen is that the original developer simply vanished for years and
a couple of people took over in his stead. Is that what's going to
have to happen to get the bell fixed, too?)

So add me to the grumpy crowd that thinks the original change in
behavior was misguided, who think that taking 18 months to get to this
point is way, -way- too long, who disagree that the fix is to continue
to make this the responsibility of the window manager -at all-, and who
wish nobody had ever broken this in the first place---and who cannot
FIX the issue ourselves. All we can do is continue to patch around it
on every release, because a fix must be committed by those who own
this code, and that's not us.