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73416ba
(Get the code!)
Mark,
You keep putting the blame on a straw target: people who refuse to accept that their one pet bug is not being addressed. Sure, those people exist, and you attitude concerning them is correct, if too abrupt in tone. But, looking at the vast majority of the comments on these bugs, the substance of the complaint seems entirely different: a strong sense of being left behind by Ubuntu.
And, you keep going back to the same line of defense: the statistics. You're proud of the 15/16 number, for good reasons.
But it's all about the substance of these bugs, not the number of them, and the way in which they are being closed. (Which is the line of defense that *I* keep going back to...) It's not that you're saying "we can't fix this," it's that you're saying, quite explicitly: "We won't; and we won't accept patches; and we won't acknowledge the underlying problems; and we won't offer alternative solutions; and we won't tell you what our plans are, if any, that disallow this; and we won't tell you why."
In GNOME 3, they can close a bug by saying "Well, this is outside of our vision, so it's better handled as an extension." And now they're even actively endorsing these extensions, with an impressively friendly site. But, there's no such thing as Unity extensions.
(There is such extensibility when it comes to application indicators, another part of the Ayatana umbrella, and there's indeed a healthy community effort to develop more and more of these, many which solve usability problems inherent in the default desktop experience: for example, a "classic" menu for those who find it hard to use the Dash with a mouse. It would be nice if Ubuntu engaged these devs and integrated indicators better into Ubuntu, like GNOME has. But, remember, I opened the community engagement bug originally for Unity, and it's there that the problem is most severe, for technical as well as project-management reasons.)
Moreover, I think I can safely say that there will not be Unity extensions. That would fly in the face of everything you said about programmer availability, testability in the long run, etc. Opening the door to extensions, with a supported open-ended API, seems far more problematic than merely allowing the Launcher to be movable. I would be very surprised, pleasantly so, if this would ever become a priority. An extension API *is* community engagement in the most material way.
Pavel Golikov is an unsung Ubuntu hero, and I doubt he will be acknowledged as a hero by the Mark and other insiders. He is the sole person behind the fork to allow the Launcher to be movable to the bottom:
https:/
Look at all those commits! But, it's doomed to fail, and we all know it: he will not be able to always keep his fork well-merged with the Unity trunk. Forks are great in many cases, but this is exactly that situation where you want to keep the main binary intact and allow for extensions. But, Golikov did not stop at the "won't fix". He saw a community need, and stepped up to the plate on his own time.
I've been following the multiple-monitor issue as closely as I can as an outsider, and I still have absolutely no idea how Unity is going to solve it, if at all, for 12.04. You originally closed the bug for the movable Launcher because you said you wanted to keep the Dash button close to the Launcher. Since they are now united, it seems that your original reason is gone. But, nobody has told *us* what the new reason is for the Launcher to stay on the left. What is this "vision"? And, nobody told *us* what people with multiple monitors (or speakers of right-to-left languages) should do. This, of course, reminded me of when Ubuntu moved the window decoration button to the left, opaquely talking about a "vision" that was never elaborated. And that was the point where I suddenly realized the real, endemic problem, and opened this bug about community engagement.
Final note --
I would suggest that the 15/16 fix rate is due not only to the diligence of the programmers, but also to the care by which the Ubuntu community opens these bugs on Launchpad, tends to them, responds, etc.
I participate in many free software projects, and of course much of that work is in bug triaging, but a lot of effort goes to communicating with the opener of the bug. (Some would call that effort "wasted," but that's exactly the attitude that I'm trying to fight here.) I can honestly say that I'm impressed by how well, on a whole, bugs are *opened* in Ubuntu. I can't find the citation right now, but I remember you saying a long time ago that Launchpad was one of the most important parts of the Ubuntu vision. It was one of your many statements that made me commit much of my professional (and personal!) life to Ubuntu. This was a commitment to the community. Moreover, it was reaching out and telling you that you needed us. Unsurprisingly, many answered the call.