Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

> Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
> either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
> completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
> suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?

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..."

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.