Comment 82 for bug 974480

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.