Comment 5 for bug 779382

Had a good chat with seb128 about this on IRC, and now understand better what's happening / why / what we can do about it.

The unity-2d behavior change is a deliberate bugfix to bring it in line with the unity-3d behavior. So there is no bug in unity-2d here; the bug is that unity-2d was not *previously* respecting the unity requirements wrt systray behavior.

And this is the exact same behavior that existed in natty when running unity-3d with the "/apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false" setting described in the lucid release notes.

So this is a regression in behavior between beta-1 and beta-2 only for users who are using unity-2d rather than unity-3d.

It is still a very serious regression; users who have modified the behavior of their desktop in a rather common way, and who were not using unity-3d, will upon upgrade to current oneiric no longer receive notifications of available updates - including security updates, and any updates needed in order to fix the lack of updates. It does not impact unity-3d users only because natty already shipped with this behavior, but it does impact all users who are using unity-2d in oneiric, or users who were using the GNOME fallback in natty and may upgrade to oneiric beta-2. Those users who are not using the default unity desktop (in either of natty or oneiric) are also far more likely, proportionally, to have this setting turned on: if they've overridden one default in favor of historic behavior, they're more likely to override another default as well. So I expect a large number of unity-2d users to be affected.

To be fair, the users affected are also much more likely to notice the lack of updates and do something about it. But that's far from certain; users may have applied this setting on behalf of their less-tech-savvy relatives, etc.

We certainly want to get update-notifier ported to use libappindicator, which would make this problem go away. (The update-notifier part of this bug is effectively a duplicate of bug #497913). However, that's unlikely to be done in time for beta-2, and since this bug impacts the very ability of users upgrading to beta-2 to receive further updates, I think it's important that we have some fix/workaround in place for beta-2. I therefore propose that we add update-notifier to the unity-common whitelist (/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/com.canonical.Unity.gschema.xml) for beta-2, and we can then evaluate after beta-2 whether it's feasible to port update-notifier to libappindicator for this cycle.

We should also apply the same fix to natty. It won't help all Unity 3d users who are already affected by this issue on natty, but it will help some and limit the damage from spreading any further than it already has.

I'm therefore targeting this bug to natty and also targeting the beta-2 milestone. Strictly speaking we don't need this to be fixed on the beta-2 live CDs, since users of those CDs aren't going to have the non-default update-notifier setting, but we should have something in place at least in the archive for the benefit of upgraders before beta-2 is out.