Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Conscious User wrote on 21/04/10 22:28:
>...
> As a regular reader of Ubuntu Forums, I know for a fact that there are
> two things in Ayatana that really need improving:
>
> 1) Communicating the goals and current status to end users. The amount
> of people who think the messaging menu is only a launcher, for
> example, is overwhelming. And I cannot really blame them in those
> cases. What should I say? "Well, it's obvious if you were subscribed
> in the Ayatana list, or saw these technical and developer-oriented
> specification wikis or saw this specific post of this developer's
> blog whose name you didn't even know until now..."

That's true, we haven't done as good a job of communication in the past
as we could have. But we're working on improving it. For this issue
yesterday there were posts on design.canonical.com,
markshuttleworth.com, this mailing list, Twitter, and Identica.

I'm not sure where would be an appropriate place on the Forums to start
the conversation as well. Do you have a suggestion?

> 2) Making easy to revert to the original behavior, at least until
> *full* feature-parity is reached. I'm not talking about a GUI, but
> recompilation should not be required. The main example of how this
> is currently lacking is Empathy. If the user does not like NotifyOSD,
> he can install notification-daemon. But if he does that, the heavily
> patched Ubuntu version of Empathy becomes broken. And because the end
> user has no obligation of knowing what came from Ubuntu patches, who
> also ends up suffering is upstream bug triagers, who have to deal with
> a lot of misdirected reports. This is creating a lot of bad blood and
> earning Ubuntu a very bad reputation among both upstream developers
> and end users.
>...

I'm not familiar with how heavily Empathy has been patched, but in
general, that's a QA process problem, not an engineering problem. Bug
reports on Ubuntu applications should be reported at
bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu. They should then be reposted upstream *if*
they also exist in the upstream version.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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