Comment 232 for bug 332945

On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 15:01 +0000, Philippe Escarbassière wrote:
> @Jonathan
>
> I didn't speak about developers. I'm a developer myself and I try not to
> bash other developers and respect their work. But I listen to users
> feedback too.

I wasn't picking you out in particular, I'm just hoping to avoid a bunch
of "stupid Ubuntu devs" stuff. However, I think it's worth noting that
Ubuntu developers do listen a lot to user feedback. The problem is that
"listen" doesn't always mean "do whatever a user wants".

I've been trying to play it fairly neutral here, but perhaps it's
worthwhile to say a few personal things. I was an early vocal critic of
notify-osd, Dx team, etc. I had a few "discussions" with mpt on IRC
about update-notifier/update-manager specifically. I called up the
Ubuntu Community Manager and let him know what I thought and echoed a
lot of the general sentiment on this bug report. The conversation was
fruitful I think and I was told that much was being done to address the
community feedback.

In response to a lot of user and developer feedback quite a few changes
are planned for Karmic Koala. One of the biggest problems I had with
what happened in Jaunty is that notify-osd was landed so late in the
development release cycle that very little in the way of corrections or
polish could be done. However, Mark and several others felt that it was
important to get the work that had been done out to users for testing
and feedback. We'll just have to see how it works out.

> In this case, even if 221 votes are not a proof (plus other forum posts
> and wiki comments), it's clearly an indication this new behavior is not
> welcome to everybody. That's why I find this change premature. And some
> other constructive comments posted here are very good argument against
> it too.

Yes, it is clear it isn't welcome by everybody, and unfortunately that
is a fairly common occurrence in a project this large with as diverse a
user population as we have. We have numerous examples (NetworkManager
being one that seems sort of similar) where a consensus can take a very
long time to achieve, if ever (there are still "replace NM with wicd"
polls on the forums). I honestly think notify-osd was premature for
Jaunty and wish it was put off until Karmic as a default. But that
decision isn't up to me, and that's probably a good thing :-)

There are a lot of good comments on the bug report, which is why I'm
trying to direct people towards better places to put those constructive
comments.

> Now, since it's too late to revert a default gconf value, let's see how
> this feature/bug will be accepted by Ubuntu community and, if it's
> clearly rejected, let's hope next bug reports like this one will be
> taken more seriously.

I agree that we'll just have to wait and see, but I do firmly believe
that these bug reports *are* taken seriously. I know many of the people
involved, mpt, Mark, tedg, pitti, etc. and I can tell you that they very
much take constructive comments seriously and are very interested in the
user experience. I don't always agree with their
decisions/implementations but I'm very confident in their skill and
desire to make Ubuntu the best it can be.