dx-packages team mailing list archive

[Jason Lefkowitz <jason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To belatedly add my $0.02:

I'm a user of Rackspace's backup product Jungle Disk
(https://jungledisk.com/). They provide Jungle Disk binaries for Linux,
even packaging them as DEBs, which has made it very convenient to use
with Ubuntu.

Unfortunately their software relies on a systray icon to provide the
only entrance point for a user to get into the application. So if that
icon is not available, the software becomes effectively unusable.

In the past I was able to use the whitelist to ensure that the icon
would still be displayed, but that stopped working with the removal of
the whitelist in Raring. When we reached the release of Saucy and the
app was still not migrated to AppIndicator, I contacted Rackspace to ask
if they had any plans to update it. Their response was that the app
works fine in Precise, and since that's the most current LTS edition I
should just use it instead of Raring/Saucy/etc. until a new LTS edition
is released.

This indicates that retiring the whitelist in order to prod developers
to update their software was kind of meaningless, since as long as 12.04
is supported they can just tell users to use that. And since 12.04 will
be supported for a VERY long time, they can sit on this excuse for not
updating until nearly 2018! So there's really not any particular
pressure on them to do things the Right Way.

I understand the motivation for removing the whitelist, but since it was
present in the most current long-lived LTS version removing it before
the next LTS release just put users like me in the bind of either having
to stick with 12.04 to support one app, or throwing away otherwise
functional software. Which is not a great position to be in.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/974480

Title:
  Notification area whitelist is obsolete

Status in Ayatana Design:
  Fix Released
Status in Unity:
  Fix Released
Status in “unity” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Mark has asked us to consider retiring the notification area whitelist
  for 12.10. The application indicator system has been in place for two
  years now, which should be long enough for applications to adopt it.

  If the whitelist was retired, Java and Wine would be hard-coded as the
  only software still able to use the menu bar as if it was a
  notification area, because their developers don't necessarily know
  that Ubuntu even exists.

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