First things first:  jucs, can you put a debdiff up here?  Or at the
very least a patch against current "apt-get source"?  Thank you!

On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:17:57 -0000
Mat Tomaszewski <email address hidden> wrote:
> Julian, thanks for being the first person who, instead of complaing, 
> actually did something.

Some of us who use the system have full plates and _don't_ have the
time to do anything about it.

Some of us are working on client-paid work, and use Ubuntu to get our
work done.

Some of us expect to be able to use our systems.

Some of us expect to not be talked down to when filing a bug that is a
bug, caused by someone's inability to (not) see what I can't.

You know what?  I didn't have a problem with notify-osd, the concept.
But the sheer arrogance of:

  * making ubuntu-desktop depend on it,
  * marking the bug invalid in the first place, assuming that I meant
    something other than what I said.
  * not bothering to read the bug (Intrepid is not "an alpha release",
    it is my previous release and where I expected my settings to be
    carried from).
  * That _every_ place that this issue has been brought up that I can
    find, the person who brings it up gets shot down, even by Mark.

> To all others that have spoken: your voice is being heard and is not 
> ignored. But please have patience - we don't have 300 developers
> here, and every piece of software must first be stable, before it can
> be upgraded/changed.

As a developer who already has _far_ too much on his plate and hasn't
looked at the notify-osd package source yet, I can say at least these
things:

 * If the people who wrote it couldn't make this trivial change
   quickly, it is designed _wrong_.
 * Your (Canonical's) condescension towards those with visual problems
   is duly noted since we're just a bunch of complainers anyway.  I'm
   not blind, but I don't have perfect vision, and a large display
   area.  What was *@canonical.com's response?  Hrm.  See earlier in
   this bug.
 * If the software isn't stable, _why_ is it in a release?  It should
   be postponed for Karmic, if it is not stable.  Oh, maybe that Grumpy
   Groundhog can come out and play if Ubuntu wants rolling development
   and people to test it.  I'd run it if it bloody existed. Well, I
   would have a year or even six months ago---I don't know that I would
   anymore.
 * Your message ignores the issues:
   - YOUR developers made it hard to uninstall notify-osd.
   - YOUR developers made it hard to _SEE_ notify-osd, at least for
     _some_ users (hi, us busy overworked not-quite-blind complainers).
   - YOUR processes permitted this piece of unstable software (your
     words, not mine) into a distribution to be released Real Soon
     Now.  Was that a decision to make it so that stability of
     notify-osd came after code freeze in Ubuntu and we'd be stuck?
     Was it lack of forethought?

I have used Ubuntu on the desktop for a long time because so far it's
been a good choice.  It's offered me *_choice_*, and it's offered me
recent software that I wanted, not ancient stuff like Debian does.

While the latter still exists, the former doesn't seem to matter as
much to Canonical anymore as it used to.  Nor do bug reporters seem
to matter to Canonical very much anymore, looking at the live email
feed of bugs generally.

Your message as well as most of the other @canonical.com messages in
this bug, and in other bugs elsewhere for things like regressions and
packaging errors show this quite well.  Ubuntu has a problem, and it's
_far_ bigger than notify-osd.

-- 
The problem with quick and dirty, as some people have said, is that
the dirty remains long after the quick has been forgotten.
                            --- Steve McConnell