Installing codecs exposes "bad" and "ugly" terminology

Bug #146167 reported by Matthew Paul Thomas
22
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gnome-app-install
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned
gnome-app-install (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Low
Unassigned
gst-plugins-bad-multiverse0.10 (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned
gst-plugins-bad0.10 (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned
gst-plugins-good0.10 (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned
gst-plugins-ugly-multiverse0.10 (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned
gst-plugins-ugly0.10 (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned
gstreamer0.10 (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Ubuntu Gutsy, without any extra codecs installed

1. Try to open an MP3 file.
2. In the alert that appears, click "Search".
3. In the window that appears, check the checkboxes, clicking "Confirm" after each one.
4. Click "Install".
5. In the "Apply the following changes?" window, expand the "To be installed" section.

What you see: "gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg" and "gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly".

What you should see: Something that doesn't use the word "ugly".

Walt Mossberg: "When I tried to play common audio and video files, such as MP3 songs, I was told I had to first download special files called codecs that are built into Windows and Mac computers. I was warned that some of these codecs might be “bad” or “ugly.”" <http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070913/linuxs-free-system-is-now-easier-to-use-but-not-for-everyone/>

Ways in which this could be fixed (not mutually exclusive):
* Give the plugin a more intelligent name. (This would be the most reliable solution, as it would work for all installation methods.)
* Since I've already clicked the "Install" button, don't show the "Apply the following changes?" window at all.

Revision history for this message
Bryce Harrington (bryce) wrote :

Googling for "codec good bad ugly" returned as its first result, http://thomas.apestaart.org/log/?p=537. This has a reply from the GStreamer release manager about the decision.

The first comment to this blog post suggests that it would have been clearer to use the names:

plugins-stable "good"
plugins-experimental "bad"
plugins-nonfree "ugly"

Personally I like Spaghetti Westerns, but I do think the "stable"/"experimental"/"nonfree" labels would be better here.

Revision history for this message
Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

It's difficult to justify diverging from upstream here, but we should support changing the name upstream

Revision history for this message
Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

Meanwhile, it should be possible to change the package descriptions (they should be more descriptive anyway), and show those exclusively (and not the package names) in the UI

Revision history for this message
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu) wrote :

Showing the description should be implemented in gnome-app-install.

What would you propose for the description? Would this solve this bug?
GStreamer plugins from the non-free ("ugly") set
GStreamer plugins from the unstable ("bad") set
GStreamer plugins from the stable ("good") set

Or would you remove ugly/bad/good entirely?

Revision history for this message
TerryG (tgalati4) wrote :

Triaged to Confirmed. I like spaghetti westerns as well, but to anyone who hasn't seen "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" staring Clint Eastwood, would be lost on what "ugly" means. At some point the names could be changed. It's up to the gstreamer developers or the Ubuntu packaging team to make less-offensive aliases.

Changed in gnome-app-install:
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu) wrote : Re: [Bug 146167] Re: Installing codecs exposes "bad" and "ugly" terminology

TerryG wrote:
> Triaged to Confirmed. I like spaghetti westerns as well, but to anyone
> who hasn't seen "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" staring Clint
> Eastwood, would be lost on what "ugly" means. At some point the names
> could be changed. It's up to the gstreamer developers or the Ubuntu
> packaging team to make less-offensive aliases.

I agree with Matt that we shouldn't change the package name (specially if Debian
doesn't do so, but even if it was my decision to change it in Debian, I wouldn't
do it), but we can change the Description and make gnome-app-install show the
description.

Another thing would be for gstreamer's uptream to change the names, of course.

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

Emilio, someone who is (rightly) alarmed when we call software "bad" would be even more alarmed if we called it "unstable" AND "bad". So no, that wouldn't solve the problem, it would make it worse. :-)

Revision history for this message
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu) wrote :

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Emilio, someone who is (rightly) alarmed when we call software "bad"
> would be even more alarmed if we called it "unstable" AND "bad". So no,
> that wouldn't solve the problem, it would make it worse. :-)

heh, right. Perhaps the same but removing bad/ugly/good. Although I doubt that
will be any better than it is now, as a user will be as (or more) alarmed if he
sees unstable (or experimental) than if he sees bad or ugly.

Non-free sounds like a good replacement for ugly. good doesn't need to be
replaced at all. But for bad... what about "not-so-good"? :)

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

I think "stable", "experimental", and "nonfree" (as suggested by Sean) would be fine, and those names should be used upstream. But as I said in the initial report, Ubuntu shouldn't be showing the "Apply the following changes?" window at all.

Revision history for this message
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu) wrote : [Fwd: Re: [Bug 146167] Re: Installing codecs exposes "bad" and "ugly" terminology]

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> I think "stable", "experimental", and "nonfree" (as suggested by Sean)
> would be fine, and those names should be used upstream.

Forward it to upstream them ;-)

> But as I said in
> the initial report, Ubuntu shouldn't be showing the "Apply the following
> changes?" window at all.
>

Agreed. And if that's fixed the gst-plugins-* could be closed as obsolete (it
would still be showed as bad/ugly in Synaptic, but if a user goes to synaptic
and installs the package by hand he likely knows what he's doing, that's
completely different than going to play music and seen that dialogue).

I would really like to avoid diverging from Debian now that we have the
gstreamer stack in sync.

 affects gnome-app-install
 status confirmed

Revision history for this message
Michael Vogt (mvo) wrote :

What should gnome-app-install do about this? The description of the gst-plugins-bad0.10 is:
Description: GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
 GStreamer is a streaming media framework, based on graphs of filters
...

So the short description has the word "bad" in it pretty prominently. I would suggest to remove this from the short description. There is nothing in g-a-i or the app-install-data package that would show "bad" otherwise.

Changed in gnome-app-install:
status: Confirmed → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote : Re: [Bug 146167] Re: Installing codecs exposes "bad" and "ugly" terminology

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 09:32:01AM -0000, Michael Vogt wrote:
> What should gnome-app-install do about this? The description of the gst-plugins-bad0.10 is:
> Description: GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
> GStreamer is a streaming media framework, based on graphs of filters
> ...
>
> So the short description has the word "bad" in it pretty prominently. I
> would suggest to remove this from the short description. There is
> nothing in g-a-i or the app-install-data package that would show "bad"
> otherwise.

Is the best way to fix this to change the gstreamer packages, or can they be
overridden in g-a-i to provide proper descriptions?

How about these:

Description: Multimedia plugins for GStreamer (stable)
Description: Multimedia plugins for GStreamer (experimental)
Description: Multimedia plugins for GStreamer (restricted)

--
 - mdz

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

Again, what gnome-app-install should do is described in the initial report: "Since I've already clicked the 'Install' button, don't show the 'Apply the following changes?' window at all."

Changed in gnome-app-install:
status: Incomplete → New
Revision history for this message
era (era) wrote :

I have marked this as affecting gst-plugins-{bad,good,ugly}{,-multiverse}0.10 as a means of suggesting that the short package descriptions for these packages should be changed in accordance with Matt Zimmerman's suggestion in comment #12. Regardless of whether the removal of the "Apply these changes?" dialog gets implemented, having less oblique short descriptions for these packages would be a welcome improvement, and is by and large independent of how upstream looks at this issue, as far as I can tell.

Changed in gstreamer0.10 (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Incomplete
Matt Zimmerman (mdz)
Changed in gstreamer0.10 (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in gst-plugins-ugly-multiverse0.10 (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in gst-plugins-ugly0.10 (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in gst-plugins-good0.10 (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in gst-plugins-bad-multiverse0.10 (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in gst-plugins-bad0.10 (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in gnome-app-install (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Phillip Susi (psusi) wrote :

This package has been removed from Ubuntu. Closing all related bugs.

Changed in gnome-app-install (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Invalid
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